The Strange Case of Baby H

by Kathryn Reiss

  “I’d better check—” Clara began, then broke off, biting her lower lip. Mother would surely object to a trip to the park, or anywhere. Stay home, she would say. Help out here, where I can keep you safe. Clara shook back her tangled red hair and took hold of the wheelchair handles. “Aye-aye, Captain,” she said firmly.

  It wasn’t easy pushing the wheelchair through the streets. Her quick run over to Emmeline’s house yesterday had taken her through quiet streets to the north. Now they were walking south, and the streets were choked with people pulling their belongings behind them in wagons or pushing them in prams. And if wagons and prams could make it to the park, Clara told herself determinedly, then so could a wheelchair. She steered the chair around piles of rubble. She had to stop and lay boards across a wide fissure that split the road, creating a bridge for the wheelchair to ride across. She hesitated, looking down into the crack. It was eighteen inches wide, and when she peered down into it, she saw nothing—only blackness.

  The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickled the way they had before she first leaped from the highest diving board at the Sutro Baths. The way they did each time she paused at her brother’s closed bedroom door and put her hand on the doorknob. She shivered when faced with the unknown. This crack in the street led down—how far? And—to what?

  The center of the earth?

  She gripped the handles hard, pushing down the flutter of panic, and trundled the wheelchair across the bridge. She did not look back.

  Two blocks from their house, Clara and Father came to Golden Gate Park. The park had always been a haven from the bustle of city life. It was a glorious expanse of hundreds of acres stretching west to Ocean Beach and the vast Pacific. Clara had learned at school how the parkland had once been sand dunes—but that was hard to imagine whenever she strolled the exquisitely landscaped gravel paths winding around Stowe Lake, watching young men courting their lady friends out in the rowboats. She loved the tulip gardens surrounding the Dutch windmill. She loved the woods full of eucalyptus, Monterey pines, and cypress trees. She and Gideon had ridden on the merry-go-round and the live donkeys while their parents sipped tea in the Japanese Tea Garden on Sunday afternoons. Even after Gideon’s death, Clara escaped to the park whenever she could. It was a place of both tame and wild beauty—with birds singing in every tree, and buffalo in their enclosed meadows grazing nearby. A peaceful place.

  But not anymore. Clara and Father stopped on the corner across from the park entrance and stared.

  The park was swarming with distraught families. Thousands of homeless people thronged the gates, arriving from all directions and stamping through flower beds as they headed for the food lines or the tents being erected by soldiers. Everyone was hauling belongings in carts, wagons, or wheelbarrows. Baby prams were piled high with dishes, pictures, birdcages, washtubs, dolls and toy trains, clothing, and books. Clara watched in amazement as several steamer trunks with roller skates attached to each corner were wheeled past her. She and Father almost laughed at the sight of another family all straining together to push their upright piano across the street and into the park. But it was too sad a sight, really, for laughter. This was the stuff of people’s lives, and they were lucky to have any of it left.

  Clara maneuvered Father’s chair across the street and followed the crowds into the park. Large planks of wood had been nailed up between trees just inside the park’s entrance gates to form a makeshift signboard. Near the signboard was a barrel of blank paper and a box of stubby pencils. Hundreds of notes already had been tacked up on the boards. Clara put the brake on Father’s chair and stepped up to the signboard to get a closer look.

  LOST!

  Paul E. Hoffes, nine years old. Light complexioned, blue eyes. Please notify his mother. Panhandle in park, opposite Lyon Street entrance.

  Mother is Looking:

  Estelle, come to your Mother on the main drive of the Park.

  Dan Mclntyre: Your family is looking for you! At the South Dune, back of the Children’s Playground, you will find a board reading “Mclntyre and Olsen Camp.”

  —Your sister May

  Clara tried to push Father’s chair along the path but was hindered by the stream of people. Ahead of her she could see the green meadows covered by campsites. Families had erected shacks and strung blankets between the trees for privacy. No campfires were allowed, Clara read on signs posted on the trees. All food had to be eaten cold or be obtained from one of the soup lines.

  “Mommy, Mommy, where are you?” howled a child, stumbling past and disappearing into the crowd.

  “Turn back, Clara,” said Father. “This is a madhouse.” His voice was low-pitched, wretched with helplessness.

  Clara obediently turned Father’s wheelchair around. “I wish we could do something to help,” she said, staring over her shoulder after the child.

  “Well, we can’t,” he muttered. “Mother is right. There is enough to be tended to at home.”

  They retraced their path through the desolate streets, over the boards bridging the fissure, past the piles of rubble, back toward their own house. As they approached, they saw Mother struggling on the front steps with another woman. Mother’s voice was raised in anger. “Take your hands off this baby!” she shouted at the younger woman, who seemed to be trying to wrest the infant from Mother’s arms. “I told you no, and I mean no!”

  “Hold on, Father,” Clara said, and tightened her grip on the handles of his chair. She started running as fast as she dared, calling out, “We’re coming, Mother! Hold on!”

  “What in tarnation is going on here?” demanded Father as he and Clara jolted to a stop by the front porch.

  Clara set the brake and raced up the steps to her mother’s side. “Get away,” she yelled at the young woman who was tugging at the baby’s blanket. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The baby was crying, and suddenly the woman started crying, too. She looked to be not much older than Clara herself, actually—more a girl than a grown woman. She wore a ragged red dress, torn at one shoulder, the skirt partially covered by a grimy white apron. Her hair and eyes were both pale, nearly colorless, and her face was smudged. The tears cut paths through the soot on her cheeks.

  “This is my baby,” she wailed. “You must give her to me!”

  Clara reached out and intercepted the howling baby. Holding her close, she backed down the steps. “If this is your baby, why did you leave her with us?”

  “It was the earthquake!” cried the young woman. “I was fleeing through the streets, and I was so frightened. I panicked … I thought this looked like a safe place … so I put her in your basket …”

  “That is where you found her,” Father reminded Clara.

  But Clara was not convinced. This young woman’s pallid skin, with smudges like bruises across the pale cheeks, bore no resemblance to the baby’s pink-cheeked complexion. The woman’s close-set eyes were watery blue—nothing like the infant’s wide, dark gaze. And besides, the baby was an orphan—wasn’t she?

  “There was the note,” Clara said slowly, tightening her grip on Baby H. “Why would you say the baby was an orphan if you were very much alive?” Clara shook her head. “You don’t look a thing like her. And why would you dress your baby in boys’ clothes and shave her head? It just doesn’t make sense.” She took Mother’s arm and turned toward the backyard. “So until you can prove to us who you are—forget it.”

  The young woman in red flew after them, her voice rising in panic. “Oh, please! I must take her back or else—Oh, Lord, there will be terrible trouble! I mean—there’s danger—Oh! You must give her to me!”

  “Take her back where?” demanded Mother.

  “Trouble from whom?” asked Father, wheeling his chair across the path.

  “To her home! To her parents—” shrieked the hysterical woman. Then she covered her face with her hands and crouched low, wracked with sobs.

  “So you’re not the mother,” Clara declared. “I knew it.”

/>   “I never said I was! You said it!” sobbed the woman. “I’m her nanny! Her nursemaid! And I need to get her home safely now—over to Oakland. There’s very grave danger—you don’t understand—”

  They all started at a great boom in the distance as another house was destroyed by explosives.

  “We’re all in grave danger, that I do understand,” said Father. “But I must ask you to leave now. I don’t think the ferries are running to Oakland—we’ve heard that the fire has consumed the wharf area. If you have no place to stay, you will find help at the park.”

  “But the baby—” She reached out her arms toward Clara.

  “Surely you can’t think I’m going to believe you’re my little Henrietta’s nursemaid any more than I believe you’re her mother?” Mother said coldly. “Now leave us immediately, as my husband asked you to. Or we shall summon the authorities!”

  “The police?” The girl grew even paler. She backed away, but her eyes were blazing with anger and—Clara thought—fear. “All right, I’m going,” she shouted, walking out to the street. “But you’d better keep Helen safe for me! You keep her safe until I can come back for her, or you’ll be sorry!” She ran down the street toward the park, her skirts a flash of red in the gray, smoky air.

  Clara stared after her. Her heart was thumping hard.

  “Helen?” asked Mother. “Did she say ‘Helen’?”

  “She did,” replied Father.

  Clara looked down at the baby’s face. The tiny girl was quiet now, staring up at Clara with dark, puzzled eyes.

  CHAPTER 6

  NOISES IN THE NIGHT

  Helen starts with H,” murmured Clara.

  “So do Hester and Hannah and Hope … and Hepzibah!” Mother frowned at Clara. “It doesn’t mean anything. I thank you, Clara, for helping to get rid of that pushy girl, but don’t start thinking her story makes sense. She admitted she lied about being Henrietta’s mother, and she’s lying about being her nursemaid, mark my words. Henrietta is staying with us. I’m not letting her out of my sight for one single second.” Mother took the baby from Clara and marched up the steps to the front door. “Now there’s work to do.” She went into the house and shut the door firmly.

  “Father? What do you think?” Clara felt uneasy. The young woman had seemed so afraid. Not just scared of the earthquake and fire, but scared of something else. Something worse.

  Something still to happen?

  Father shook his head and spread his hands. “Mother knows best,” he said quietly, and Clara sighed. That had been Father’s refrain ever since the accident. Mother hadn’t wanted Gideon going on the steamship run; she thought he was too young for such hard work. Father had only laughed and said she babied him. Gideon was big, strong, and very nearly a man—and he wanted to go with Father. So they had gone off together on that last, disastrous voyage. Mother never said “I told you so,” but the accusation was in every glance at Father, in every movement.

  Clara pushed Father’s wheelchair into the backyard, thinking about the woman in the red dress. Who was she really—nanny, or something else? Had she left the baby on the doorstep—or had someone else? And why?

  Clara left Father sitting with the lady lodgers and their children and went indoors after Mother. She spent the rest of the day beating plaster dust from rugs, making up beds with fresh linens, and sweeping broken crockery into trash bins. She arranged books onto shelves and repotted tumbled houseplants. And as she worked, the puzzle of Baby H receded. Instead, memories of Gideon played behind her eyes like pictures on a stereoscope: The two of them sitting here in the front parlor, doing their school-work at the table by the fireplace. The two of them running upstairs and sliding down the banister. The two of them riding the tram to Ocean Beach at Lands End. The two of them swimming at the Sutro Baths, that incredible crystal palace where pools were filled by the tides and swimmers slid down slides or dropped from trapezes or leapt from springboards into the water. She remembered the two of them poised on the high dive, listening to voices below shouting up to them—“The girl is too young! Bring her safely down the ladder at once!”—before Clara launched into her perfect swan dive, followed by Gideon, slicing through the cold deep water. Gideon had taught her well.

  While Baby H napped in her wooden drawer, the lodgers ventured indoors to ask Mother whether they might risk sleeping in the house tonight. Mother said that only a few rooms had been cleaned, but unless another quake brought the house down on top of them, she did not mind who slept where.

  Despite the dust still hanging in the air and the grit underfoot, Clara was glad to crawl into bed that night and lie between clean sheets. Sleeping on a soft mattress on the floor of her parents’ room beat sleeping in a dusty bedroll outdoors on the grass, poked by roots. Baby H snoozed at Clara’s side, tucked into the drawer. The lodgers, including Mrs. Grissinger and Mrs. Hansen and their children, bedded down throughout the house wherever they found a clean spot to lay their blankets.

  Clara listened to the creaks and groans of the house and to the shouts in the distance. She pictured the people in the park, settling down in their tents. She wondered where Emmeline and her family were and hoped they were safe. She saw in her mind the dirty, haggard face of the young woman in the red dress, and she turned over and placed one hand protectively on the bundle of baby sleeping at her side. Finally, Clara slept too.

  She dived off the rocks like a sleek gray seal, rippling through deep water toward the dark figure struggling beneath the surface—

  Humphrey’s low growl in her ear made her jump awake. “Wh-what is it, boy?” she whispered into the darkness. Had it been minutes or hours since she drifted off? Was there going to be another earthquake each time she had one of the swimming dreams? She looked around. In the dim room she could just make out the shapes of her sleeping parents and Baby H. She patted the floor next to her. “Lie down, Humph. Good boy.” She closed her eyes again, throwing her arm across Humphrey’s broad back. The dog growled again, low in his throat.

  Then it was only a second before she and the dog were both on their feet, listening at the closed door of the bedroom. There was something—some strange noise.

  “Shh,” Clara shushed Humphrey. “Listen—”

  Was one of the lodgers walking about in the parlor? But no one was sleeping in there. Clara gripped Humphrey’s collar. Her parents slumbered on. Should she wake them? But Mother would panic and Father would be helpless and angry. Maybe she could alert Mr. Midgard and Mr. Stokes—but no! They weren’t home … It was up to her to see what was wrong.

  Clara started to tiptoe out the door with Humphrey right beside her, her fingers tight around his collar, but then she stopped, looking back into the bedroom. Her eyes fastened on the fireplace poker by the hearth.

  Better than nothing.

  A scraping noise. A thump. Definitely coming from the parlor.

  Heart thudding, Clara gripped the iron poker and headed down the hallway, Humphrey at her side. She waited in the hallway just inches from the open parlor door. Two more steps and she would be able to peek inside.

  Craning her neck, she looked into the room. In the moonlight she could see the bookshelves, the potted aspidistra, the high-backed settee. But no one was there. She relaxed for a moment and loosened her hold on the dog’s collar. Then her gaze swept toward the broken window, and she sucked in her breath.

  There was an arm stretching itself in through a broken windowpane—an arm in a black sleeve groping for the window catch.

  Clara froze. It must be a looter! she thought, and then raced forward into the room and slammed her iron poker down onto the arm. An agonized howl from the figure outside, Humphrey’s frenzied barking, and Clara’s shouts for help merged into a terrible ruckus that brought Mother and the lodgers racing into the parlor.

  “Mother! Help!” shouted Clara. “Don’t let him get away!”

  “Stay back, Clara!” Mother spun Clara away from the window—but Clara saw that the man was already out in the
street, clutching his arm and running fast. Then a second figure emerged from around the side of the house and scrambled after him, long skirt flapping.

  “Two of them!” Clara exclaimed.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Miss DuBois and Miss Chandler crept nervously into the room. Mrs. Grissinger and Mrs. Hansen followed. Mr. Granger and the Wheeler sisters peered into the room from the doorway.

  “There was somebody outside—” began Clara, but Mother cut her off.

  “Looters now on top of everything else—and you chasing them!” Her voice broke. “Oh, Clara, I couldn’t bear for anything to happen to you.”

  “Goodness, I do wish the menfolk were here,” said Miss DuBois, putting an arm around Mother’s shoulders.

  “I’m here,” protested Mr. Granger in his quavery voice.

  “And I’m here.” Father rolled into the room in his wheelchair. He took in the sight of Clara standing with the poker and shook his head. “But you seem to have things well in hand, daughter.”

  “A man was at the window!” Clara explained what had happened. “His arm—oh, Father!” She shuddered, remembering. “I didn’t even think—I just slammed the poker down. Then two people ran off—”

  “Two men? In which direction did they go?” asked Father quickly.

  “Toward the park, I think,” said Clara. “But it was a man and a woman, Father. The woman came running around the side of the house. Perhaps she’d been hiding there!”

  “I was awakened by a noise at the dining room window,” said Miss Chandler. “She may have been trying to climb inside.”

  “Lady looters.” Father shook his head morosely. “Nothing will surprise me anymore.”

  The baby’s thin wail reached their ears.

  Mother hurried into the hallway. “Poor little mite—wakes up and no one is there … I’m coming, Henrietta!” She called back over her shoulder to Clara, “You come along now back to sleep. I want you with me!”