A Race to Splendor (50 page)

“Well, let’s just say marriage is… within the realm of possibility.”

“What about children?” J.D.’s bantering tone had vanished and Amelia detected wariness in his expression. “I want children with you, Amelia. I also never thought I’d say that to anyone, but I do. Are you willing?”

She met his unwavering glance. “Oh, I very much want to have children with you. It’s the institution of marriage I find so—”

Before she could finish her sentence, he grasped her hand and held it against his chest. “It’s all about building our confidence. What say you that we start with partnership—and advance from there? I’m betting that both of us might eventually come to appreciate the convention.”

“Well, you were always a high-stakes gambler,” she said, laughing.

What an incredible twenty-four hours this had been, Amelia mused, tilting her head for a brief kiss. She had thought last night she’d come to bid farewell to the Bay View forever, and here she was, walking along the plush carpeting of their beautiful, brand new building. Her mother would eventually come back from Paris and Aunt Margaret and Consuela would soon have hotel suites for themselves. The amazing turn of events had once again created a family-run hotel—just like the old Bay View.

Only better!
a voice whispered in her ear.

Charlie Hunter would have been proud that she and J.D. had fulfilled his dream of helping to make San Francisco a port city that would vie with New York and New Orleans. She imagined that all the survivors of April 18, 1906, would always live in the shadow of what had happened here—and what could happen again. But in the strangest fashion, the disaster had also been a gift, showing at least two wounded hearts the crooked path to love and trust.

A few minutes later, Amelia and J.D. entered the dining room filled with paying guests sitting at tables covered in snowy linen and gleaming silverware. For a moment, they both stood at the door, absorbing the beauty and gaiety of the scene.

“We
did
it, J.D.,” she murmured. “The Bay View has survived in a way neither of us could ever have imagined.”

J.D. put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “And we did it together, my dear Amelia, even if we didn’t win the race against the Fairmont. I think from here on out, the ghosts at our hotel will be friendly, don’t you?”

She nodded and glanced around the elegant dining room. She could almost feel the spirits of her grandfather, her father, Ling Lee… and even dear Barbary. They’d never be alone here.

“May I tempt you with a bite of lunch?” she asked. “My spies tell me that the Bay View serves excellent cuisine, now that that hideous German chef is no more and Mrs. O’Neill permanently rules the kitchen.”

“Your spies are correct—because
you
never rehired him,” J.D. replied.

“That is true, and before I left on Tuesday, I begged Mrs. O’Neill never,
ever
to put sauerkraut on the menu again. I was delighted to learn that you’d already sent down the order. I
hate
the stuff!”

“Well, then, that does it!” J.D. said with a laugh. “We’re obviously destined to marry one of these days. I cannot even abide the
smell
of sauerkraut!”

Amelia wanted to kiss him right then, but instead, gestured toward a north-facing window.

“Shall we take that table over there… the one with a view of the bay?”

Acknowledgments

Perhaps it’s the result of my former life as a journalist, broadcast commentator, and observer of some extraordinary events in my own lifetime, but I have always been drawn to the notion of telling stories that take place on a “large stage” through the eyes of everyday witnesses and the documents they leave behind.

In
A Race to Splendor
, as in several of my historical novels, my fictional characters are distilled from the records of everyday people, struggling to survive epic trials and tribulations—and eventually triumphing.

That being said, the biggest thank you offered here in this Age of Digitalization is to the unsung librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and others who toil in the bowels of research libraries and historical societies around the globe.

In a work the length of
A Race to Splendor,
I specifically wish to pay tribute to the professionals who preserve documents, letters, diaries, photographs, architectural drawings, original images, and ephemera at such institutions as the Museum of the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Main Library facility. I offer my undying gratitude for the existence of the Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck and other special collections at the Bancroft Library, in addition to the University’s Environmental Design Archives—collections that form part of UC Berkeley’s vast repository of research materials.

Thanks, too, are due the Julia Morgan and Sara Holmes Boutelle collections at CalPoly in San Luis Obispo; the San Francisco Historical and California Historical societies; the Harriet Rochlin Collection of Material about Women Architects in the United States at the UCLA Library; and the special collections and newspaper archives both of publications in existence during the 1906-07 period of this historical novel, and the day-in-day-out archiving of current publications in paper files and now, on the Internet.

The Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill has an impressive collection of vintage photographs and historic material that they kindly shared with me during a meeting early in the writing of the book. The San Francisco-based firm of Page and Turnbull, specialists in architectural and conservation services for historic buildings, delved into Morgan’s role in the 1906 restoration of the Fairmont during their work on the renovations of the hotel in the year 2000, and kindly recounted some of that adventure for me.

In preparing to write this novel, I read secondary sources too numerous to detail here, but the most noteworthy and readable for those wishing to learn more about Julia Morgan’s body of work as well as events surrounding the cataclysmic 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire include:
Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty
by Mark Wilson (2007);
Julia Morgan, Architect
by Sara Holmes Boutelle (1988; paperback 1995); and
Julia Morgan, Architect of Dreams,
by Ginger Wadsworth (1990; part of a series of biographies for young readers).

Perhaps the most riveting nonfiction account of the early twentieth century catastrophe is to be found in Gladys C. Hansen’s
Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
(1989).
Born some twenty years after the temblor, Hansen became the City’s expert on both the quake and the subsequent firestorm. Even after her retirement as a City librarian, she made it her mission to account fully for the number of people killed, since a combination of bad record keeping and governmental cover-up had held the official figure at 478.

Not unlike the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the quake in Haiti, and the BP oil disaster, the “official” numbers surrounding the event continue to change. As of this writing, the confirmed death toll of the San Francisco catastrophe has passed five thousand and continues to rise. Numbers of Chinese killed were noted at about a dozen in the official reports of the day. Five hundred Chinese dead is the more likely number. The fires lasted three full days and destroyed 2,831 acres of the city. Thirty schools, eighty churches, and four hundred city blocks were consumed, leaving more than 250,000 of the city’s 400,000 people homeless.

Thus it is that I wish to extend my profound thanks to Gladys Hansen and others who have produced some of these statistics by searching coroner’s, medical, and Army records, church journals, city directories, old maps, and letters from mourning relatives about family members who were never heard from again after April 18, 1906. Each year on the anniversary of the shaker that hit at 5:12 that cloudless spring morning, we are given a more accurate assessment of the extent of this watershed event in American history.

On a personal note, many friends and members of my family supported what turned out to be my decade-long effort to research, write, and bring this book to publication. Local historian Daniel Bacon, his book
Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail
(www.barbarycoasttrail.org), and his fabulous “live” walking tours of areas devastated in 1906 were invaluable resources. I deeply appreciate his encouragement and friendship to a relative newcomer to the City by the Bay. Authors Diana Dempsey, Michael Llewellyn, Mary Jo Putney, Gloria Dale Skinner, Bardet Wardell, and newsletter editor Diane Barr, along with cookbook author Diane Worthington and edible landscape expert (and my niece), Alison Harris, read various drafts and/or maintained over a long period both their enthusiasm and belief that this book would find a happy publishing home—and it did.

Part of the credit for this goes to editorial specialist Jennifer Jahner, who took pity on me at one difficult point in the writing of the manuscript and helped me find the correct spine of the story. My agent Celeste Fine of Folio Literary Management guided the project to CEO Dominique Raccah’s Sourcebooks and all three women have my deepest gratitude.

A special debt of thanksgiving goes to my revered editor at Sourcebooks and its Landmark division, Deb Werksmen, and her fabulous colleagues, Dawn Pope, Greg Avila, Susie Benton, Sarah Ryan, Skye Agnew, and others on the Sourcebooks team. Deb’s astute editorial judgment, her suggestions on the final draft, along with her inborn courtesy and kindness, make her the treasure she is, both as an acquiring editor and the person responsible for inspiring this author across the finish line.

Joy McCullough Ware not only merits one of the dedications in this book, but also a hearty sisterly hug for serving as a second set of eyes, scanning the typeset manuscript for “nonsensicals” and typos. Any remaining errors or omissions are clearly the author’s.

Tony Cook, my husband of more than three decades—and a “recovering” journalist himself—extended his keen editorial sensibilities and sound judgment when it came navigating the publishing world.

My son, Jamie, and his wonderful new bride Teal, as well as friends on Facebook, were great sounding boards about cover design and “test marketing” among a younger generation of readers. A vintage photograph of the post quake, burnt-out hulk of the Fairmont Hotel, given me by Jamie one Christmas, sat by my computer for years as inspiration to tell this story.

As with every historical novel I’ve written, I keep asking the question: “What were the 
women 
doing in history?”

The person I must thank for originally posing this key query is a celebrated academic I once heard give a lecture at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I’ve held a Readership in Eighteenth c. British-American History.

At one point in Professor Gerda Lerner’s presentation, the author of
The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History
suddenly pounded the podium and—I’m paraphrasing some twenty years later—passionately declared to an audience of visiting and resident scholars, “Half of human history has yet to be written because the lives of women weren’t properly chronicled by historians; and the half of human history that 
has 
been written is woefully
inaccurate
because the lives of women weren’t properly chronicled…[she paused, and then added] …by (mostly) male historians.”

I emerged from that lecture with my hair on fire! From that moment to this, tracking down “What were the
women
doing?” in any age became my quest.

In my six works of historical fiction—and certainly in
A Race to Splendor
—I have chosen to do some “chronicling” of my own.

So thank you, dear Dr. Lerner. And thanks to Michael Llewellyn and Tom Rotella for brainstorming with me to come up with the perfect title…

Ciji Ware

Sausalito, California

Ciji Ware enjoys hearing from readers at www.cijiware.com

Reading Group Guide

1. A number of recent natural disasters have taken place on or near America’s shores: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Are these “regional” events, or do they impact the United States as a whole? In what ways did the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and firestorm impact the nation? What lessons did the country as a whole learn? What aspects were shunted aside?

2. How did California change as a result of the devastation of four hundred city blocks and some 250,000 people being made homeless in the space of less than forty-five seconds? What building practices and safety codes eventually resulted from this catastrophe? How prepared do you think your locality is in the event of a natural disaster?

3. What effects do such natural disasters as San Francisco’s 1906 quake or events like the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 have on the national psyche? Was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake a “first” for such a major event rattling the confidence of the entire nation?

4. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 8, 1882. The measure allowed Congress subsequently to prevent any more Chinese immigrating to the United States. This ban against a specific nationality was intended to last ten years and wasn’t repealed until 1943. In what ways was the treatment of the Chinese in the United States—and in San Francisco, particularly—similar to the Jim Crow laws and treatment of African-Americans in the South? In what ways was it different?

5. Chinese women were bought and sold in San Francisco as late as the early twentieth century. In the novel, Loy Chen has rescued Shou Shou from the “highbinders” who have forced her into prostitution in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As a young girl, Amelia was forbidden to go near the district, and she later admits to her own prejudices against that race. How does the natural disaster affect her and other characters’ perception of her Chinese neighbors? How aware were you that such Chinese slavery existed in the United States into the last century?

6. What does the novel reveal about the role played by some supposedly esteemed “city fathers” in the practices of gambling and prostitution? What conflicts and challenges face entrepreneurs, even today, who do not subscribe to such corrupt and illegal practices, yet, like J.D. Thayer, must operate within the stranglehold of local “power players?”

For additional reading group discussion questions, please visit www. sourcebooks.com/readingguides.