Private Life (20 page)

telescope, in spite of the fog and in spite of the smoke. He wasn't looking for anything,

and he wrote down no findings or observations. He might even have slept--he didn't

know--but the time had passed. Yes, she thought, the time had passed while seeming not

to.

The fires had been burning for four days, but they began hearing some bits of

good news, one of which was that, thanks to the efforts of their own Lieutenant Freeman

(whom Mrs. Lear seemed to know), the contingent from Mare Island had, in fact, saved

the ferry building and quite a few other buildings and docks on the water side of the

Embarcadero, and also managed to keep order and prevent the locals from raiding the

saloons, getting themselves drunk, and falling prey to the fires. With little water but much

ingenuity, they had done a great deal of good for the city (though they had dynamited a

few too many buildings as a precaution, but no one cared about that). That day, they

heard that the fires were abating, turning back upon themselves, or failing to leap over

dynamited areas west of Van Ness. That evening, Margaret was walking down their

street, wondering what they could do, and Hubert Lear called out to her from the upper

balcony of the Lear house. "Ma'am! Ma'am! Mrs. Margaret!" She turned, and he stubbed

out his cigarette. He was standing on the railing, and he took off his cap and dipped his

head. Then he shouted, "Oh, Mrs. Margaret, she was a very nice lady. We are all really

sorry about what happened to her."

"Thank you for your thoughts, Hubert."

"We all prayed for her and the other one by name, every night. But I guess it

didn't work."

"Maybe it still will."

He shook his head, began, "Mama says ...," then fell silent. After a moment, he

said, "Anyway, we all liked her, and we thanked her for the tennis rackets. So she just ..."

But then he seemed embarrassed, and jumped down from the railing and went inside. She

didn't say anything to Andrew about this when she got home, though it was a warm day,

and the windows on that side of the house were open. He could easily have heard their

exchange. But it was for herself that she was grateful to Hubert Lear: the interchange had

woken her up again, reminded her that survival was a task, above all. Nothing more,

really.

Andrew finally got himself to Golden Gate Park. He stayed overnight in one of

the tents, then, starting at daybreak, walked all over the park and up to the Presidio,

asking after, and looking for, the two ladies. When he came home, he was willing to

admit that he had not found them. That afternoon, he telegraphed his brothers again,

saying that he had searched for their mother and Mrs. Hitchens and "not found them."

Margaret was with him as he wrote out the telegram. She saw him write "yet" on the

form, then pause, look at it, cross it out, then look at it again. She didn't say anything. He

sent the telegram that allowed his brothers to infer that the two ladies had perished. By

this time, names of some of those whose remains were being discovered were coming

out. There were not so many--a few hundred, for which the mayor declared himself

relieved and proud. But there were more. Everyone knew there were more. Everyone who

had been there and escaped had seen more with his or her own eyes.

Andrew and Margaret could not stand talking about it anymore. She wrote a long

letter to Lavinia, some sixteen pages, telling her as much about what had happened as she

could, especially everything she knew, or suspected, about Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens.

It would be her mother's responsibility, after all, to fill in all the news and rumors. Even

as she wrote this letter, she could imagine her words flying about the streets of Darlington

and in and out of kitchens and parlors, alarming and electrifying everyone, including

those who knew the Earlys only by sight. As for John Early and his wife, she told her

mother to go to them first, share the letter with them first, so they would be prepared for

the hail of gossip and well-wishing they would have to withstand. The letter took her two

days to write. By the time she sent it off, it was eight days since the earthquake, or a year,

or a lifetime. Then she began going to memorial services--for Mrs. Devlin, for other men

who were lost, for everyone. Andrew went to the naval ones, but he wouldn't agree when

Mrs. Lear asked him if he would like to hold a service for his mother, or to include her in

one.

Margaret had been to many a funeral over the years. She had found, at least back

in Missouri, that a funeral was much like a wedding, in that the display was as important

as the occasion. Everyone knew with a funeral, as with a wedding, that there would be

considerable gossip afterward about the real nature of the deceased and what the funeral

showed about the family--the neighbors could get inside the house and look around while

the family members were distracted. But it was not like this at the memorial services for

the earthquake victims. At these memorial services, people reflected, not upon just

deserts, but upon miracles and tricks of fate, the perfect example of this being the

memorial service for Mrs. Devlin, where her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter sat in the

first row, between her father and her aunt. The weather was beautiful, and the windows

were open to the sounds of birds singing in the trees outside. Prayers were said. Eulogies

were made. Father Nicoll didn't tell the story, but everyone knew what there was to

know: Mr. Devlin, in his hasty trip to the city on the day of the quake, had had no luck,

but later, there Mrs. Devlin was, in the middle of Beale Street, probably felled by bricks-her body was found next to a collapsed house. She was identified by the contents of her

shopping bag, which lay underneath the body, unburned. The child, Emma, turned up in

Folsom Street, many blocks away--almost to Ninth. She was shoeless, and her hair had

been singed, but she was otherwise unhurt, walking about, crying. Had she been carried

there by some kind person, then abandoned? Had she walked there? Every possibility

seemed equally unlikely, and yet here she was, and she had no way of telling what had

happened to her. How she was found was equally unlikely--two drunks, wandering from

saloon to saloon in search of liquor, picked her up and took her with them. At their

second or third stop, Mr. Devlin's cousin, who was a sailor on Lieutenant Freeman's ship,

happened to be in that saloon, rounding up the drunken populace. He didn't recognize

Emma, but she recognized him. The cousin was detailed to take a ferry and bring her

home. It was the very next ferry to arrive after the one carrying a distraught and hopeless

Mr. Devlin. Emma's father was wandering about the wharf, not knowing what to do next,

when his cousin came running up to him and told him that Emma was found. The

operation of larger forces, it seemed to Margaret as she sat at the memorial service,

stripped them for the time being of their own pettiness, in a way that the steady and

predictable stream of deaths she'd grown up with had never done. She had made a few

friends at the memorial services and joined a knitting circle; then she met two other

women who liked to read books.

Andrew did not accompany her to the memorial services, but he did reproduce his

gunshot experiment with Hubert Lear, and he bought a camera and made some plates of

the results. Then he sent it off to
The Astronomical Journal
with dispatch, as if he had

never hesitated. Both Margaret and Andrew knew he was doing it for his mother, but they

didn't speak about it. After that, he devoted himself to investigating the earthquake--he

went to Benicia, he went all over Vallejo, he went up to Napa and overland to Santa

Rosa. He went back to San Francisco and down to Oakland. He corresponded with men

in San Jose and Santa Cruz and Sacramento. He gathered every fact and observation he

could: How had the chimney fallen? Which bricks had toppled, which bricks had

remained in place, which part of the road had sunk, and how far and what was the angle

of the shear? He wanted to see every single thing that the earthquake had done, every

change that it had wrought. He read all the papers and all the reports, but in fact he was

not as interested in the casualties as he was in the killer itself, in its exact portrait. He

walked right up to survivors and asked questions, not about how the survivor was feeling,

but about what, exactly, fell off the shelf and what did not, and how wide the shelf was,

and what it was made of. Which wall collapsed and which did not? What time, to the best

of your estimation, did the fire reach your block, and where were you standing when you

first noticed it, and were you looking toward Second Street or toward Harrison Street-that is, do you think the fire was coming straight toward you or doubling back upon

itself? After the building collapsed, could you actually hear people screaming, and if so,

for how long would you say the screaming lasted? There was a ghoulishness in the

questions he asked (others did, too), but people wanted to answer, no matter what they

had lost.

Later, Margaret thought that, in measuring this bit of subsidence and the cracks in

that tower, and in estimating forces and keeping copious detailed notes, as he knew so

well how to do ("Testimony of Mary Griffin, aged 27, who was residing at 306 Mission

Street at the time of the quake. Miss Griffin was asleep in her bed on the first floor, in the

northeast corner of the house"), Andrew performed the kindest act of his life. And he

carried his camera about with him. He photographed mudflats and rock faces and brick

walls, usually with some easily recognizable object in the photo for scale. During these

investigations, he did not talk much about his mother, but he did exclaim, from time to

time, that now he understood what the earth had done, almost moment by moment. When

the final report about the earthquake came out two years after the earthquake, Andrew put

his copy on the shelf just below his mother's photograph, two thick volumes, her

monument (more so, Margaret thought, than the stone his brothers had erected in the

graveyard, beside the grave of their father). But even the longest book, she now

understood, was the merest reduction of any experience, or any life.

ONE DAY, after this work was finished, Andrew said, "My dear, do you ever

think about the moon?" They were eating supper.

"You mean, about the craters?"

After the article had come out in
The Astronomical Journal
, he had written a more

popular one for the
Examiner
. As a contributor to the investigation of the earthquake, he

was given quite a bit of space to explain his theory. And there was also a picture of

Hubert Lear with his shotgun, sitting nonchalantly on a high branch of a tree, with

Andrew looking up at him from below. The article was a local success, and Mrs. Lear

framed it and hung it beside her front door.

"No, no, no," he said. "Not that. Do you ever think about how the moon came to

be just where it is?"

"Where it is in the sky?"

"More or less, but of course it's not in the sky. It's in space."

She had forgotten this. She considered him actually quite patient with her

continuing, and apparently obdurate, astronomical ignorance.

"I gather that you don't ever wonder about how the moon came to be just where it

is."

"I may have wondered that at some point, but I'm used to it now."

Andrew

laughed.

"So, how did the moon get to be where it is now?"

"Well, you see, that's a question that is not so easy to answer, my dear. In fact,

when I myself asked my astronomy professor that question in college, he told me that it

wasn't worth asking."

"Why

not?"

"Because most people think that it can't be answered."

She said, "It does seem like it
should
be answered."

"Yes, it does." But he fell silent, and it appeared that he didn't have the answer

after all.

A few nights later, she was reading and decided to go to bed. She turned out the

lamp above her chair. The room went dark, and the light through the window silvered

over her book and her lap. She looked up, and there was the moon, just rising, large and

round and friendly. She stood up and went to the door of Andrew's study. When he called

out, "Come in!" she opened the door and said, "All right, where did the moon come

from?"

He grinned and said, "What do you think of this idea--that, long, long ago, the

Earth was not solid but was, instead, fluid and molten, hotter than red hot, more like a

cauldron of molten iron without the cauldron?"

She thought about this. She said, "What would keep it all together if there were no

cauldron?"

"A combination of gravity and centripetal force."

She imagined she understood this.

Then he said, "You know, the moon and the Earth don't remain the same distance

apart. The moon gets farther away."

"It

does?"

"A little bit every day, a very little bit. It's the effect of gravitation. The Earth's

rotation is being slowed down by the moon, and so days are getting longer, while the