A City Tossed and Broken (14 page)

I retrieved the water and food and brought it back to Mrs. Crandall. We ate a quick supper and now I’m in my room with the light out. Mr. Crandall has not returned. As soon as Mrs. Crandall retires I will sneak out to meet my father.

April 26, 1906

Thursday

I’m thinking this will be my last entry. Once I record what happened, I am going to put this book away and not look at it for fifty years.

We had to be careful because of the sentries. We slid from shadow to shadow until we got near the top of Nob Hill. We turned down Sacramento and walked through the twisted and broken wrought-iron gates. Andrew Jewell was waiting there.

I found the three stacked bricks, charred black. I nudged the dirt with my toe. “Here.”

We had not considered that the shovel I had used would be useless, twisted metal with no handle. We had to dig with stones, and the bent metal of the shovel, and then our hands. Lucky for us I had not buried the box too deep.

Jewell reached in for it eagerly, then let out a hiss. “It’s still hot.”

My father covered his hands with his sleeves and lifted it out. The lock was still intact. I had the key in my pocket, the watch ornament. I handed it to my father.

“No,” Jewell said. “Let me.”

I handed him the key.

He slid the key into the lock and opened the box.

He drew in a breath at the sight of the neatly stacked cash.

It happened so fast we didn’t have time to blink. I saw a faint orange line, and the next thing I knew the contents were ablaze.

With a howl, Jewell reached in and tried to take out the cash but it was burning paper now, and he threw it down.

“You tricked me!” he screamed. “You set it on fire!”

“No trick,” my father said. He stared down at the still-burning contents. With his boot, he flipped over the box and quickly kicked dirt over the ledger, putting out the fire. “I’m guessing it was just too hot to open. When the oxygen hit, it ignited. We should have waited, maybe.”

“Maybe?”
Jewell screamed. “Are you really standing there watching a million dollars go up in smoke, calm as you please?”

“I don’t see how shouting is going to bring it back. Though it might bring the sentries and we hardly want that,” Papa pointed out.

Jewell stamped away. He stood a few feet from us, his shoulders heaving.

“You knew,” Papa whispered.

I shrugged my shoulders.

Papa shook his head, and then he laughed.

“Now you’re
laughing
?” Jewell said, turning around furiously.

“I don’t see anything better to do. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t.”

“This isn’t over, Jock Bonner,” Jewell said. He brushed past us and disappeared into the gloom.

We heard his footsteps echo for a while, and then there was only silence and stars.

“Oh, it’s over,” my father said softly. “He is a man of empty threats.”

“Were you going to take the money?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t have given us the chance. Jewell had a gun in his pocket. He was planning to take everything — but he would have left the ledger.”

“You mean you wouldn’t have fought him for it? It was a fortune!”

“It was a considerable temptation,” he said. “But not worth it, I think.”

I don’t know if he was telling the truth. But I’ve decided to believe it.

Without speaking, we climbed one more block to the crown of Nob Hill. We walked past the broken stone lions of one of the mansions to the only thing that remained of the Towne mansion, the steps leading to the marble-columned portico. We climbed the steps, my father and I, and gazed out. By the light of the pale moon we could see the skeletal dome of City Hall through the empty frame of the columns.

There were scattered lights around the hills, from outdoor stoves, I guess. That was the only way I knew there were people out there, tucked into these bare hills where once there had been houses and restaurants and stores.

I had a strange sensation right then, diary. As though I were on the top of a world about to be born. I could smell the bay, the wild salt smell of it. For the first time in a week, it overpowered the smell of decay.

“Heard lots of hammering and sawing today,” Papa said. “People starting to rebuild already.”

“You’d think they’d all be leaving,” I said. “Scared to live here after what happened. But they’re staying.”

“That’s what faith is,” he said.

We stared out at the graying sky, the flares of light.

“Plus, it’s a kind of paradise here, isn’t it?” he asked.

“If you don’t mind the earth cracking open,” I said.

“Everything has a flaw, Min. Even cities. Doesn’t spoil the beauty one bit.”

That first day I arrived — I thought of it then. The blue bay and the white houses and the sky, and the air so fresh at the top of the hill. How exhilarating it all was.

“This is our chance to start over,” he said. “We could make something new.”

“But how? We have nothing.”

“We have this.” He showed me the ledger in his hand, charred and black.

“But it’s ruined.”

“Crandall won’t know that. He doesn’t need to see inside it; he just needs to see it exists.”

“And what will we ask for in return? The tavern?”

“We could. Or we could ask for the money from the sale.”

“But why would he say yes, after what I’ve done?”

“Because of what you saw in this book. And I do not think a man with so much to lose will pursue this any further. He has too much to gain.”

“And then . . .”

He made a suggestion that surprised me. “What if we wrote to your mother and asked her to come out here? Perhaps we are holding on to something we don’t want anymore. We’re just in the habit of thinking it’s our only hope. The tavern will be gone soon anyway,
chérie.
The city is changing and leaving us behind. But we could start something here. This strikes me as a place people may start over again.”

“Do you think she’ll say yes?”

“If she doesn’t, we’ll go back. We’ll be together. Whether she lets me in the door or not. I don’t know what will happen. I just know I have a way to make amends. Thanks to you, Min.”

I don’t know what will happen, either. But when everything is gone, what can you do but have faith?

We could see the beginnings of sunrise now, just a glow of pink in the sky. We walked back down the hill in that ravishing light. Outside the house on Green Street we saw the remains of the crate neatly stacked on the lawn, ready to be taken away.

I stopped on the stairs and looked through the window. The painting leaned against the wall. Lily’s gaze stared out at me, her mother’s heavy hand on her shoulder. She looked nothing like me at all.

At the dining room table I saw Mr. Crandall smoking a cigar, sitting and waiting for me.

You can have your life back now, Lily. I won’t be living it. Rest in peace.

Papa took my hand. “Ready?”

I’m ready.

When Minnie admitted her deception, Mr. Crandall’s fury blasted her eardrums. Mrs. Crandall threatened to telephone the police. Then she realized that she didn’t have telephone service.

Mr. Crandall calmed down when Jock Bonner produced the ledger and suggested that it would be to all of their benefits to let the deception be passed along to earthquake shock and upset. He offered to toss the ledger into the stove outside, let it burn, and start over. He also pointed out that without Lily, Mr. Crandall now had full power over the Sump estate.

Mr. and Mrs. Crandall calmed down quickly.

Mr. Crandall paid the Bonners for the sale of the tavern. Minnie and her father had an anxious ten days of waiting before hearing from her mother. She informed them that she would come to San Francisco, but she had not forgiven her husband.

With the money from the tavern sale the Bonners built and furnished a restaurant in downtown San Francisco that they called Lily’s. Mrs. Bonner didn’t talk to her husband for thirty-two days, which was surely a record. Lily’s became a favorite restaurant during the rebuilding of downtown, and the customers stayed loyal — politicians, journalists, businessmen, and writers.

Hugh Crandall went on to establish the Sump Trust, which he administered. The Sump Trust was an important financial partner in the rebuilding of San Francisco. Mr. Crandall became a rich and successful attorney specializing in commercial real estate. He and his wife built a showplace on Nob Hill on the site of the old Sump mansion.

Minnie never forgot the Jennardis. They reopened their grocery in six months, in a new building in North Beach, the Italian section of San Francisco. Minnie often thought about seeking out Jake to explain what had happened to her and her family, but she could not get up the nerve. Then, nine years later, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, they ran into each other. Although so much time had passed, they knew each other instantly. Within a year they were married and moved into a small house on Telegraph Hill with a view of the bay.

Jake Jennardi became a partner in the restaurant, and it became a San Francisco institution, popular with locals and tourists, and known for its French and Italian food. Today it is run by their great-great-granddaughter, Alessandra Jennardi.

Minnie and Jake had three children. Their eldest son, Dante, took over the restaurant when they decided to take early retirement and divide their time between the city and their house on a vineyard in Napa Valley. Jake died in his sleep at the age of eighty-three, and Minnie lived until she was ninety-one. For the last ten years of her life, Minnie was an honored guest at the April 18 earthquake anniversary ceremony at Twentieth and Church Streets, when the hydrant there was repainted gold in memory of its role in saving the Mission District and Noe Valley from the fire.

Jock Bonner would still take off for weeks at a time, but he never gambled again. He was a beloved grandfather to Minnie’s children for a few short years. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five, while sailing with a friend on San Francisco Bay.

Hazel Bonner surprised the family by marrying again, and lived a long life with her second husband, a professor of geology.

Mr. Crandall and his wife had two daughters. When her father died, his daughter Lavinia took over the trust in partnership with her cousin and best friend, Delia Flynn. Together they expanded its interests from commercial buildings into the nonprofit world of libraries and museums. The Sump Trust funded many projects in Chinatown and working-class neighborhoods, starting libraries and school lunch programs during the Depression. Lavinia never got along with her mother.

Andrew “Slippery Andy” Jewell started a new life in Los Angeles. He worked in vaudeville doing card and magic tricks and then as an extra in the developing silent film industry. He was shot during a poker game in 1922 at the age of forty-two.

“There is no water, and still less soap.

We have no city, but lots of hope.”

— Anonymous inscription scribbled on the ruins of Market Street

At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, a powerful earthquake ripped through San Francisco at an estimated 7,000 miles per hour, throwing many people out of their beds. Some never made it that far — 95 percent of all the chimneys in the city collapsed in that shock, some of them on people still asleep.