Private Life (32 page)

watching them? Five people were killed, including two children, and dozens injured. In

the days after that, Margaret had her typing done by nine in the morning, and then went

straight to the hospital. She hardly thought any longer of what now seemed like the

utterly vanished life of not being at war.

But Andrew was unmoved by the war. Even though the entire knitting circle

thought that the Germans had paid members of the IWW to get onto the island and blow

up that magazine as a warning, he thought that the powder in the magazine had heated up

overnight, and a rush of air into the building in the morning had set it off. Nor was he

daunted, in his daily walks to the observatory, by what they saw around them--ash and

rubble, death and burned-out buildings from the explosion, but also new buildings meant

for the war effort seeming to shoot out of the ground. However, he allowed her to lock

their doors, which they had never done.

Andrew did wonder aloud about Pete--he regretted not having him around as a

sounding board for his expanded theories of the universe. Margaret had nothing to say

about Pete. Like everything else, thinking of him reminded her only that fresh waves of

men were getting shot every day, for either fighting or defending, spying or deserting.

Dora's pieces began to appear, the first entitled "My Woman Lorry Driver," about

a trip she took between London and Southampton with a twenty-year-old girl who was

transporting cabbages. Dora then got from England to France, made her way from Calais

to Bordeaux, then over to Pau, Marseilles, and Genoa. She skirted the front lines, though

not the war. Her tone was adventurous rather than fearful, and each time Margaret read

one of Dora's pieces, she thought that her wish--her attempt--to keep Dora away from the

war had been worse than futile and worse, even, than selfish. Surely Dora and Pete had

known exactly what she was doing and laughed at her for trying to trim their adventurous

lives to the dull pattern of her own. Her embarrassment lingered even when the

dispatches from Italy began to sound worried--"Portrait of a Family That Has Lost Five

Sons (Savona, Italy)," "A Russian Speaker Is Silenced by Doubt (Lucca, Italy),"

"Children on the Beach (Portofino, Italy)," and "Opinionated in Parma." The pieces

conformed to a pattern: Dora would set out to find a loaf of bread or to enjoy a patch of

fine weather or to meet a long-lost friend, and she would encounter someone--in one

case, children playing with a battered ball, whose father had been killed in the war and

whose mother had disappeared a week before. Dora talked to them and gave them money,

but when she returned with a local priest who promised to help, the children had

vanished. The opinionated young woman in Parma was German. Her opinions concerned

the catalogue of crimes committed against the Germans by the French, the English, the

Russians, and the Americans. Dora quoted her without comment. She lingered in Parma

for three weeks, then went east to Bologna, and farther east to Padua. She kept moving

toward the war, recording the hardships that she saw, but with that same idle, wandering

tone. In a piece called "Three Nights in the Mountains," she was driving from Padua to

Perugia when her car broke down. She saw no one but deer, hawks, and a wildcat for

three days. The village she walked to was abandoned. Then two men came along in a

wagon. There was also "Hidden Treasures of Ravenna," in which she reflected on

someone named Theodoric, who had previously conquered Italy from the north and was

buried there. In "I Am Grazed by a Bullet," she related how the sleeve of her jacket was

torn by a bullet outside of Trieste, which everyone seemed to be fleeing. But by the time

the Italians lost the battle of Caporetto, Dora's dispatch was from Rome, and after that

two weeks went by and she was in Spain, far from the fighting ("Toro!")--her Trieste

experience seemed to have aroused a belated sense of caution. Beatrice wrote that the

Bells did not read her articles, and put her letters away in a box, unopened. Bit by bit,

Margaret forgave herself for trying to save Dora. Like everything else from before the

war, she thought, the idea of "saving" things seemed the rankest delusion.

There was no word of Pete at all.

The two screens had been wrapped in blankets and tied with twine.

One day, she laid the first one on the rug and untied the wrappings. The screen

consisted of four panels, each about two feet wide, depicting a mountainous scene. To the

left and to the right, rugged slopes rose in the foreground, steeper than anything she had

seen even in the Sierras. In the middle of the scene, more distant peaks were still more

jagged, and on those slopes, several stunted pine trees were bunched together. The

mountains were painted in a vaporous dark ink, so as to seem especially threatening, and

the farthest ridges were partly hidden by clouds. A river flowed through a U-shaped cleft

in the mountains, and in the river floated a long narrow boat with a rounded prow,

carrying a man in a kimono. Her eye was drawn straight to the tiny face of the man, who

was sitting quietly, looking upward, not, it seemed, in fear, but in curiosity and interest.

The water flowed, the clouds drifted, the trees huddled, but the man seemed undaunted

by his surroundings.

The second screen was smaller--only about four feet tall--also four panels,

entirely painted on gold. The largest object was a black tree with rough bark, twisted and

bending to the left. Willowlike fronds of leaves seemed to toss in a breeze. Turf, or

perhaps moss, spread in irregular dark-green patches around the trunk of the tree, and

colorful birds flew in and out among the blowing leaves, or perched on rocks sunk into

the moss. Above the tree, golden clouds billowed in the golden sky. To the left, clouds of

red flowers on long, frondlike stems also tossed about, and the branches and leaves of

some other variety of tree, something like a plane tree, spread across the golden horizon.

She stood this screen up beside the first one and stared from one to the other, taking in

both effects--the startling and the soothing. She found herself breathing deeply, as if she

could inhale their atmosphere or fragrance. She sat there for hours, it seemed, but

possibly little more than a single hour. When Andrew came in, he stepped in front of her

and surveyed the two, then said, "My dear, so this is what they look like. He offered them

to me."

"To

buy?"

"Why, of course, my dear. As an investment. But my mind was on other things,

and the subject dropped, as I remember."

"They are beautiful."

"But not for display, my dear, in such humble surroundings as ours. I see that."

This seemed true. He helped her wrap them up again, and put them away. At

supper, he said, "It has crossed my mind to wonder what we shall do with them."

So, Margaret thought, Andrew thinks Pete is dead, too.

Her daily round consisted of typing, cooking, knitting scarves, packing boxes, and

discussing with the other naval wives the ins and outs of the million things that they did

not understand, including what to think of the dead whose names they knew, among all of

the dead whose names they did not know.

On the first anniversary of the U.S.'s entrance into the war, it seemed to Margaret

to have lasted much longer than a year. The island was never silent at any time of the day

or night. One thing happened that was amusing even to the knitting ladies--when the

Secretary of the Navy had issued an edict saying that there could be no sales of liquor

within five miles of a naval base, liquor and beer left town by the wagonload, and there

was a funeral for "John Barleycorn" that passed down Sonoma Street. The corpse was a

coffin-load of empty whiskey bottles. She remembered this because it was on this very

day when Andrew commented on a disease outbreak in Kansas. "Strange thing, my dear.

Very sudden, and it's not as if Fort Riley is at a crossroads. The Katy doesn't even pass

through there." He shook his head; she felt her habitual inner clang of alarm, and then, in

mid-May, he said, "Now, here, this Fort Riley thing, remember that, my dear? Very like

this flu they've had in Spain." He wrote a column about it for the
Examiner
, but it was

bumped from the paper by the Battle of the Marne. Things were so busy that she forgot

about her fortieth birthday until three days after the date.

He went to the Base Commandant about it--one morning, he merely walked down

their street and knocked on the Commandant's front door. The Commandant was in, and

Andrew told him about what he considered to be the Fort Riley/Spain connection, though

what that could be Margaret didn't understand. When Andrew got home half an hour

later, all he said was "He listened." Then he went into his study and closed the door.

The news was about the Allies' advancing from one French city to another, and

"the Bolsheviki" in Russia, who had slaughtered the Tsar and his family--nothing about

the Spanish flu. But Andrew found out that the receiving ship at the Commonwealth Pier

in Boston was overflowing with very ill sailors. Only a few days after that, Andrew heard

that dozens were falling ill at Fort Devens, also in Massachusetts. He walked back up the

street. Boston was far away. But, then, Kansas was far from Spain, too, and Spain was far

from Boston. It was a mystery, but Andrew was determined that its mysteriousness would

not lull the Commandant into apathy, even though the man had plenty of other matters to

deal with. In early September, Andrew wrote about the Massachusetts outbreak in his

Examiner
column; the next day, the mayor declared that the influenza would never come

to San Francisco and that to suggest that it would was irresponsible in the extreme.

Andrew did not flinch, but said to her, "My dear, they may all
hope
that the influenza will

not come, but I will nevertheless be vindicated."

The first case appeared toward the end of September. In two weeks, the base

hospital was full. Cases cropped up in Vallejo. The Commandant issued face masks to

everyone, and Andrew insisted she use one. About a week later, Margaret was standing

on their walk, surveying her flowers, when she saw Evie Marquardt, who lived one door

down from the Pritchards, come out of her house to the porch and sink to her knees.

Margaret didn't know what to do, but then she pulled up her mask and went and helped

Evie back into the house and onto her sofa. When she came home, Andrew made her

wash her skin and hair with lye soap and leave her dress on the back stoop. He sent a

passing sailor to the hospital to report Mrs. Marquardt's illness, and about an hour later,

they came to get Evie in the ambulance wagon. She survived. Tales abounded--four

women playing cards until midnight, three of them dead by morning. Roger Mattock, on

the hospital ship, took water and food to all of the patients, but never got sick. Everyone

on a certain block in Vallejo came down with it, except the ladies living at the brothel.

Then the Commandant himself was near death, but he survived; Captain Asch, home on

leave from China, never got ill but was killed by a motor truck late at night. It seemed

death was all around them, especially every time Margaret was delegated to write the

notification letter to the family of a victim.Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith,The United States

Navy regrets to inform you that your son, Evan Walter Smith, seaman third class, has

succumbed to the Spanish flu during the recent outbreak. He reported to sick bay at 11:30

on the morning of October 6, 1918. The progress of the illness was rapid, and he

succumbed to a catarrh of the lungs during the evening of October 8. Owing to the highly

contagious nature of the disease, all victims at the naval base have been buried in the

cemetery on the island. A service was held for your son and the other victims who died

on October 8 in the nondenominational chapel on October 9. We regret that they have

had to take these summary measures owing to the virulence of the disease. Your son's

effects have been disinfected, and will be shipped to you in a separate parcel. All

inquiries may be addressed to me, George McCracken, Commandant of the Base.

I am yours, regretfully

And Margaret, in her turn, lived in fear of letters. Beatrice's son Lawrence

succumbed, but Beatrice and Robert lived. Elizabeth, Lucy May, and Eloise never came

down with it, but Mercer almost died. Dora lived, though she was in Cairo and Jerusalem.

The Lears lived, but Hubert, in the navy off Jutland, died and was buried at sea. The

sailor who washed their windows lived; his friend died. Mrs. Wareham and her daughter

Cassandra lived, but Angus and his wife and child died. Mrs. Kimura lived, though she

continued to visit every sort of patient, according to Mrs. Wareham. Naoko lived.

On Armistice Day, everyone Margaret knew or heard of was exhausted or

changed by the Great War except for Andrew. In between the bookends of Andrew's two

vindications, the powder-magazine explosion and the Spanish flu, every day had had its

frightening news or its dire thought. The lesson of every incident was that forces were at