Belle Cora: A Novel (2 page)

My experiences in the April 1906 earthquake in San Francisco have led me to write this book, so I suppose I’ll begin there. When the first temblor came, I was in bed: it was 5:12 a.m. I was dreaming the dream I have had at least once a year for the greater part of my life, that I was an innocent farm girl in upstate New York.

In this edition of the dream, my aunt’s hands were gripping my shoulders. Her husky voice implored me to wake up; there was work to be done. I kept my eyes shut, knowing very well that when I awoke I wouldn’t be on the farm. She didn’t understand that, naturally; she was dead. She kept shaking me. At last she pulled her arm back and struck me so hard she knocked my head against the wall, and the floor beneath us started to sway. I knew then where we really were. We were at sea, rounding the Horn.

When I awoke, chandeliers were swinging. Precious objects in break-fronts tinkled, shuddering across the shelves; thick pillars and crossbeams split and snapped. I heard shouts, screams, and dogs barking.

Feeling that any movement on my part might make the house collapse, I at first shifted only my eyes, and then turned my head carefully. The curtains had fallen from the bedroom window. I saw a patch of sky and the ornate scrollwork of the corner of the roof of the building across the street. I understood: Aunt Agatha had died long ago, my last husband more recently, and perhaps my turn had come. I’d resided in California too long to think that one big shock would be the end of it, or that there was anything to do but wait, saying goodbye: to my jewels, the house, the sky; to the sad remains of the body that used to concentrate the gaze of the crowd when I ambled down the street twirling a parasol.

After twenty-five seconds, the second shock came. “Forgive me!” I shouted. My bed hit the floor. My back and neck hurt. The canopy top was lopsided. I guessed that a lamp, and maybe part of the ceiling, had fallen on it. I was sure that if I moved I would bring it all down on me.
The window showed no roof now, only sky. I thought the building opposite had collapsed, but it was just that I was on the floor now, looking up.

The vanity table teetered like a drunk looking for a safe place to fall, causing a slow avalanche of ivory- and silver-handled combs and brushes, mirrors, china pots, carved boxes, a playbill from the San Francisco Opera. They slid to the carpet; after a brief delay the table followed them, and a big oil painting came down and its frame split. There were more shouts.

Soon I noticed that Janet, my lady’s maid; Mrs. Flynn, my housekeeper; and Gerald, my butler, were in the doorway. I saw their heads over the fallen dresser. “Well, help me up,” I commanded, surprised at the firmness of my voice. I was very frightened. With tense faces, they stepped carefully over and around the debris. Gerald, whose brow was bleeding, propped up the canopy, while Janet and Mrs. Flynn helped me to my feet.

“It’s a miracle,” I decided, meaning that I could move at all. “Let’s go to the window. Thank you, I can walk by myself now.”

My house stood on the highest point of California Street, in the best part of the town, and we could see for miles. To the eye not much was different: a few empty spots where there had been buildings only minutes ago; here and there a mighty pillar of smoke that brought to mind the Lord as He revealed Himself to the Israelites.

Janet, who was not yet twenty, but was shaking as if she were in her nineties, tended to Gerald’s cut, while Mrs. Flynn and I went through the house to assess the damage. At exactly the same time, we turned to each other and said, “Flo.” Flo was my cook. We found her in her room, snoring, mouth agape, the beached immensities of her pale, mole-flecked body halfway out of her bed. A novel lay on its face beside a toppled dresser. Flo, I remembered, was fond of Dr. Armiger’s Wonderful Solution, a laudanum-spiked sleeping potion, and, to show Mrs. Flynn and, I suppose, myself that I was no longer afraid, I made a joke: “Florence Glynn, cook to the prominent Nob Hill dowager Frances Andersen, slept straight through an earthquake, thanks to DR. ARMIGER’S WONDERFUL SOLUTION,” I declaimed, while Mrs. Flynn shook Flo out of her stupor. “Surely
YOU
deserve sleep like this.” Her eyes opened.

I thought it was over except for sweeping and dusting, and some funerals of strangers. I should have known better.

The telephone was inoperative. I returned to my bedroom, Janet
helped me dress, and we went out into the street, which was eerily quiet and filling up with the mighty of San Francisco: rail barons and traction magnates, real-estate moguls and silver kings, and their dependents. A goodly proportion of them were unshaven and half dressed or in their nightclothes, with their hair in disarray. They looked like children caught being bad.

My club ladies lived in this neighborhood, rich women who occupied themselves, under my despotic supervision, with charity balls, the reformation of drunkards, the alleviation of slum conditions by means of forcible exposure to fine art. Each had her specialty. I found Constance in her front yard, looking like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, uncorseted, red hair loose, gripping an iron railing as if planning to cling to it should the earth move again. I found Harriet stroking the back of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and speaking to her in tones appropriate to a young child.

“Mrs. Andersen, thank heaven you’re all right,” said Harriet—as I now know, insincerely. Harriet’s husband owned the Saint Francis Hotel, and at his insistence, several years earlier she had sent Jennifer away to the Reed School in Detroit, a school, according to its statement in the advertising pages of
McClure’s
, “for Nervous Children and Children Who Are Backward or Slow in Mental Development.” Jennifer wasn’t nervous: she was those other things, as anyone realized after two minutes in her company. She had to be watched constantly; she would cross the street in heavy traffic to inspect a steam shovel.

“It’s a mercy,” I rejoined, and I asked after her family and servants. In the meantime, Eleanor and Grace, also clubwomen, came up to greet us. We embraced, too. I became very conscious that this morning there had been no baths, and no talcum or perfume, and in their place were pungent aromas of sweat and fear; my nostrils also conveyed the curious information that the feebleminded Jennifer had not soiled herself, but Eleanor had. I held her long enough to whisper, “You must change your clothes, Eleanor.” She flushed and whispered back that she was afraid her house would fall down. “Then use mine,” I hissed. “My house is sturdy,” I added, as if to say: I’m Mrs. Frances Andersen, the earthquake wouldn’t dare to topple
my
house. After a moment she obeyed me.

Shortly after this, I recognized in the crowd Brigadier General Frederick
Funston, acting commander of the army’s Pacific Division. I liked General Funston.

“General—oh, General! What can you tell us? Have many died?”

“Mrs. Andersen.”

He was panting. I now know why, having just read his highly self-serving account of that day.
^*
He had run all the way from his home on Russian Hill to Nob Hill, and then to the army stable on Pine near Hyde. After sending a message to the commanding officer of the Presidio to report with all available troops to the chief of police at the Hall of Justice, he had walked back to the top of Nob Hill, which was to the military mind merely high ground from which to view the action. He was a tubby little fellow with narrow shoulders, a button nose—cute on a baby, embarrassing on a man—and a well-trimmed mustache and tidy beard. I guessed that he would be important today, though I didn’t know how important.

“Has there been much damage, General?”

He studied me. As I said, I liked him. He didn’t like me. But I knew things about him, so he had to be respectful.

“The water mains are broken. Do you know what that means, Mrs. Andersen?”

At first I didn’t; but as soon as he turned his eyes toward Market Street and the great towers of smoke, I understood. The earthquake, when it ignited fires all over the city, had simultaneously wrecked the water mains, thereby crippling the fire department. Soon these expanding conflagrations would unite. They would become a monster, sucking wind from all points of the compass, marching up and down the hills, devouring all in its path. We stood in the shadow of edifices that would be heaps of ash a few days hence.

Funston foresaw that, which was smart of him. But he didn’t know how to stop it, and it might have been better if he hadn’t tried. This is not my judgment alone. I have spoken with experts. Since it was impossible to drown the fire, his tactic was to starve it by destroying the buildings in its path. Although this is quite the usual thing to do under those circumstances,
if it is not done just right you help the fire spread. Which is just what happened in San Francisco over the next three days. They used dynamite, black powder, and guncotton, and when they ran out of these, they rolled out the cannons and began smashing the buildings with artillery shells, and it was all worse than useless.

On Thursday morning, with the anxious assistance of the U.S. Army and the fire department, the fire reached Nob Hill and destroyed my house and the houses of most of my neighbors, leaving us with nothing but what we had been able to remove in haste.

I owe a debt to Funston, all the same; thanks to him, I began the evacuation of my own residence early. I made several trips between my house and the wharf, where Mrs. Flynn and a Pinkerton detective stood watch. I rescued my mother’s diaries and letters; my brother Lewis’s lucky rock, my brother Edward’s false leg, and a pair of gold-handled derringers formerly the property of Charles Cora, who broke every faro bank in New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Natchez all in the same year; letters written during the Civil War by my first husband, Jeptha Talbot; my collection of portrait miniatures; my jewels and clothes; a cedarwood hope chest that had once belonged to the wife of James King of William; some other choice furniture and pictures; some old daguerreotypes and photographs; and other souvenirs.

By then the city was full of armed men. There were soldiers and militia, with orders from Mayor Schmitz authorizing them—and also the “Special Police Officers”—to shoot looters. Men of citizens’ committees roamed the city, with rifles and pistols and dangerous fresh self-regard, and often I pretended to be grateful they were willing to do this odious but necessary job. I detest such men; I do not underestimate them.

People in fine clothes covered with soot were pushing hand trucks and wagons, dragging trunks, cooking on the sidewalks and the streets, and eating outdoors on card tables. They packed the squares and camped in the parks.

Everyone whose home still stood kept hoping, amid temporary victories and optimistic rumors, that the explosives would work and any minute the fire would die.

I was in the street, sitting on a broken divan from my parlor, and I was watching two thin-necked little soldiers unroll fuses leading to the
foundations of my house, which I was no longer permitted to enter, when Harriet Atherton called my name. “I’ve lost Jenny. She’s wandered off.”

“Oh dear,” I answered. Jenny unsupervised was cause for alarm even on a normal day in a city that was not in flames. I asked how long she’d been gone—fifteen minutes—and what she was wearing, and we rounded up Constance and Gerald. We agreed to look for her separately, covering different areas, and then to rendezvous at a spot several blocks north of where we were. In designating our meeting place, we took into account the fire’s rapid march.

Even so, when we met there we were too near the blaze. Smoke stung our eyes; we could hear the fire’s roar and see litter skidding down the street toward the fire. The only other people in sight were those fleeing places of still worse danger. Constance had spoken to someone who thought she had seen Jenny.

A motorcar laden with mattresses for the relief of the displaced mounted the hill. I recognized the vehicle, and its driver, a nurse who had offered me a ride earlier in the day. She was a tall, big-boned woman with a cultivated accent. I waved my arms to get her to stop.

“You shouldn’t be this close,” admonished the nurse, raising her motoring goggles.

“We know. This is Harriet Atherton; she’s lost her daughter.” I explained the situation. “I was wondering if you could help us look for her in your carriage.”

“How old?” inquired the nurse.

I told her, adding, “Mentally no better than a child. Red hair in a Gibson, a yellow dress covered with soot, and a monkey face,” and Harriet didn’t contradict me.

The nurse commanded us, “Empty the car and get in. I’ll help you find her, and then I’ll get you out of here.” I assumed the order to unload the car did not apply to me, since I was seventy-eight years old. When it was empty, I climbed into the tonneau, between Gerald and Constance.

A few minutes later, we were motoring down Van Ness in search of a young woman in a sooty yellow dress. We turned a corner, and it was the wrong corner: the whole block was in flames. Smoke rose, twisting like a cyclone. There was a rushing wind, its shape illustrated in turbulent debris. Telephone poles were burning and falling. I was thrust against Constance as the nurse spun the wheel. On the street we’d just left, pieces
of an exploding church shot into the sky. A billboard for Pears soap caved in the hood of the motorcar. The giant upside-down eye of the baby in the Pears advertisement regarded us serenely for a moment and slid out of sight.

Steam and flames rose from the hood.

“We must leave the car. Get out. Get out,” the nurse commanded. “Make haste.”

We obeyed. Gerald helped me: I was trembling. So was he. We walked. The nurse told us, “Quickly, don’t look back,” but we had to look. The car blossomed into flame. A steel fender landed where I had been a few seconds earlier.

“Look, there! Look!” cried the nurse.

Jenny was running down the street away from the intersection where the church had exploded. Harriet screamed out her name, and her daughter turned and ran toward us, weeping with relief. She thought that finding us meant she was safe.