A-Splendid-Ruin(72)

Chinatown on fire. North Beach. The concussion of explosions wracked the air. When buildings did appear through gaps in the smoke, their windows were lurid like the eyes and leering mouths of jack-o’-lanterns, glowing from the inside until they burst into flame and then nothing. I sat with others on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, among the shanties and homes built nearly one on top of the other. Men kept kegs of wine ready to dump over their roofs to douse any embers, along with rugs to soak in wine to protect their walls. Refugees had made shelters of blankets and lean-tos out of trunks and whatever could be found. The wind picked up, sending plucked feathers, bits of paper and trash, more cinders and sparking bits of debris that people stamped out wherever they fell, and again came that raging, sucking sound, a howl like a storm. The air was muggy and hot and heavy but not still, a swirling, scorching wind, sometimes strong enough to knock people back. My lungs burned with the effort of breathing it. My eyes watered and stung.

The flames took hours to burn themselves out. Nothing could be seen but for roiling clouds and the red advance of fire. The residual heat from the coals rose. Like sitting at the edge of Vesuvius must have felt, I thought. Heat and wind and poisonous smoke.

We watched the destruction as if it were an entertainment. Someone began to sing an aria, sad and mournful, an elegy, and people all around quieted to listen. If I’d been told that I was witnessing the end of the world, I would have believed it.

Then it began to rain.

The morning brought with it a scene of such destruction that it was hard to fathom. Nothing but wasteland spreading below, blackened streets where soot and ash had become greasy mud, everything smelling of smoke and rain and sewage, a tannic, noxious mix. Gray and cold except where the still smoldering embers cast a stinking fog over the ruins.

But it was, at last, over. The fires were done, leaving behind a smoking, gasping wreck. I was wet through and through and shivering as I made my way to the nearest soup kitchen set up in the middle of the street, where they gave me hot coffee and porridge. The woman looked me up and down with such sympathy that I wanted to cry. “Are you alone, dearie?”

I nodded.

“Have you a place to stay?”

“Not yet,” I told her.

“They’re setting up relief camps everywhere. They’ll have clothes for you, and supplies. Someone to check that bandage for you. You’ll look for one, won’t you?”

I said I would, and took my meal to a counter they’d set up, where people stood and ate quickly so others could take their places. I kept my head down. It was over, yes, which meant that soon the chaos would give way to authority, and authorities would be asking names and trying to determine where someone belonged, and people who had left would be returning to see to their property. The city would go on. The question was, Where would I be within it?

I did not have to continue with the plans I’d made. I had only this bloodied wool coat and nightgown, my button and these boots with their melted soles. I could do as that woman at the soup kitchen had suggested. Find a camp. Get a tent, some clothes, some food. I could hope that Blessington had burned to the ground, obliterating all those corpses, or those who had been buried, like me, in the debris—I shuddered, thinking of those screaming as the flames took them—and that everyone believed me dead and that no one was looking for me. Change my name, leave the city, become someone else and start my life over again.

But the thought of letting the Sullivans get away with their schemes, of letting them muddy my name with murder and madness, spend my money and cheat me as my aunt had once cheated my mother by selling the family home and spreading rumors that caused my father to leave her . . . No, I could not do it. I could not do it and live with myself. My mother had believed in the ultimate goodness of my father, and in the end, she had hoped that my aunt would repent and help me. Perhaps Aunt Florence had done that; I wanted to believe she had. But I was not going to waste my life suffering as my mother had done, and trust that somehow, some way, the world might right itself. The Sullivans had tried to destroy me.

I was going to take the fact that I was still alive, despite false accusations and Blessington and earthquake and fire, to mean that the world wanted my help in meting out justice.

The best plans I had for that were the ones I’d made in Blessington. But where were Dante LaRosa and Shin now? The Bulletin building on Kearny Street was in pieces. My original plan had been to find Shin first because she knew what had really happened that night, and she could clear my name. I knew from the newspaper that most of the Chinese were in a relief camp at Hunters Point. It was as good a place to search for Shin as any, but it was too far away; there were no cable cars now to take me anywhere, no bicycles, and too many military lines to cross. Yet I had to get there somehow.

Until the ruins cooled, no one was allowed back into the city without a pass, not even to examine their own property. The streets were full of militia and police and exhausted firemen sleeping off their exertion in the drizzling rain. Men walking were commandeered to help clear the streets. The city was a stranger. No clang of cable cars and calls of peddlers and newsboys. Instead the slow thud of carts and wagons and now and again the horn of an automobile speeding off with supplies. The crash of rubble and trash tossed aside or thrown into wagons. No birds but for crows picking among the ruins beside the rats, and pet canaries and parakeets and cockatiels that had been loosed from their cages to escape the fires, dashing bits of color flitting confusedly about the telephone poles and lighting upon the sagging network of tangled wires dangling to the street.