Sister Noon (20 page)

It was something to remember, something to carry with them out of the horror, that they had behaved with courage and competence. When a thing needed doing, they had done it. Miss Stevens was the heroine, of course, but Lizzie had also come through. Ti Wong survived diphtheria and the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society both, and had the scars to prove it.

The next day Bartholomew Fitton, George Maxwell, and Elizabeth Jane Comstock died within hours of one another. It was a dreadful, unspeakable day.

These proved to be the final diphtheria deaths. Of the fifty-seven children residing in the Brown Ark at the time, twenty contracted the disease and six of those died. The other fourteen recovered their health—“Children are resilient,” Dr. Kearney said—but the agony of loss was slow to recede.

F
or many months afterward, every moment of pleasure for Lizzie was quickly followed by feelings of guilt. Where before she’d wished to return to her normal self as a matter of principle, now it was a matter of need. Another magical juncture she must find the strength to refuse. But how would she ever enjoy her dinner, her book, her Saturday ride again? She lost weight, though not to the point of being thin. She couldn’t sleep. Ti Wong was the only subject on which she could allow herself to be happy.

What a bright boy he turned out to be. She loved to hear how he’d wheedled Nell into letting him make popcorn or taffy. If any of the other children asked, Nell said it was too much mess. But Ti Wong was her pet, her favorite.

When he was still abed, letting Lizzie read him Sherlock Holmes mysteries and recovering his voice, she had told Nell that they needed to give more thought to his future. Nell was surprisingly agreeable, even to this. “What would you like to be when you grow up?” Lizzie had asked him.

She herself had already decided he’d be a doctor. A Fu pulse, he’d told her. Dr. Kearney could surely be co-opted into this project. He would see the value in a doctor who spoke Chinese but was trained in Western medicine, none of that hocus-pocus of spinning needles.

Ti Wong had answered he wanted to be a Pinkerton, but that could be changed. Would have to be changed. The Pinks wouldn’t take a Celestial.

And then, just when some routine was finally returning—classes, fights among the boys, quarrels among the girls all resumed—just when it seemed things could, in fact, go on Minna Graham came to the breakfast table, complaining of a headache. The light was dreadful bright, she told them. Her eyes hurt. She asked to go back to bed. Nell was too tired to deal with it. She suggested that Minna, unable to contract diphtheria and largely ignored during the epidemic, now wanted attention. This was agreed to be just like Minna Graham. She went so far as to break out in large red spots.

Measles, Dr. Kearney said. Two weeks later seven of the children, including Jenny Ijub, had rashes. New cases continued to appear throughout the month. Fortunately the strain involved was a light one. The new epidemic recalled the tragedies inevitably to everyone’s mind, but didn’t repeat them.

n
ext came an epizoetic. More than half the horses in the Turf Gallery and the Fashion Stables on Sutter Street contracted distemper, as well as twenty of the horses in the Bill Bridges Stable, thirteen in the Hopkins Stable, and four in Roe Allen’s Stable on Market Street. Citywide some three hundred horses were affected. A chloride of lime mixed with carbolic acid was recommended for use about the barn. For horses themselves, potash and licorice root were to be applied in a paste directly onto the swollen glands in the throat.

The symptoms, case by case, were mild, but the aggregate was not; the streetcar companies were all but crippled. Yet under these adverse circumstances Myrtle Rolphe managed to get to Chinatown. Unaccompanied by police
or clergy, with the proprietor protesting her every step, Miss Rolphe walked into the bowels of an opium den. With one hand she held a lavender-scented handkerchief over her nose to protect herself from the seductive fumes. With the other she seized one of Jesus’ straying lambs by the ear and dragged him to safety. The incident was less than twenty-four hours old, and Lizzie had already heard the story five times at least.

Ti Wong could not hear it often enough. He was so obviously in love with Miss Rolphe. It made Lizzie very sad. Such an open display, such a hopeless object. She thought of Diego Estenagas, her Spanish prince. Only unrequited love lasted forever. Poor Ti Wong would spend his life desiring pretty, charitable white women who liked him only for his faith.

a
lthough all the women at the Brown Ark carried the diphtheria tragedies with them for the rest of their lives, on Mrs. Lake there was an immediate and peculiar impact. She began to insist that Ti Wong had brought the disease from Chinatown, even though Meredith Penny had obviously arrived from Santa Cruz already ill, even though there’d been no other reported cases in San Francisco and a deadly plague in Santa Cruz.

Not that it mattered, Mrs. Lake was quick to assert. No one was blaming anyone. But. Still. Lizzie thought Mrs. Lake was suffering from not having saved anybody with an emergency tracheotomy. Miss Stevens was handling herself better.

There was another factor contributing to Mrs. Lake’s imbalance. An unrelenting series of plagues is always
bound to carry a biblical portent. But San Francisco had already been hearing for some time that Armageddon was coming.

One afternoon back in October, when Lizzie had been eating a lunch at the Brown Ark, by invitation of course, she’d brought up the rumors of the appearance in Nevada of an Indian Messiah. He was reported to be preaching of the coming of a new world, a world without white people, which was even now floating in the heavens, drifting eastward from the Pacific toward the plains. When the new world landed, the whites would be destroyed, while all the dead Indians and herds of dead buffalo would be resurrected. The Messiah asked His followers only to be honest, peaceable, and chaste. He was said to perform miracles. This was all, in Lizzie’s mind, very Christian, which made it hard to dismiss.

Miss Stevens had responded to Lizzie by telling the table how, in August of 1872, the Indians in Lake County had begun to perform the Misha Dance, prompted by the appearance of a monstrous fish in Blue Lakes. They’d feared the end of the world was at hand, Miss Stevens said. Her tone of voice was amused, as if these fears had, in fact, been demonstrably mistaken.

The real subject of this conversation was Mrs. Maria B. Woodworth. Mrs. Woodworth was an evangelist, called on by God in spite of her sex. She’d arrived in Oakland after a triumphant tour of the Midwest, set up a tent, and begun a series of revivals. Here are just a few of the things people said about her:

“Genuine, old-fashioned Methodist religion” (Dr. Lewis Kern).

“I like it the best of anything I ever saw in the way of a religious meeting” (I. H. Ellis).

“The same low order which characterized the African Voodoo, and the Indian Medicine Man” (Charles Wendt, Unitarian pastor).

“Mental debauchery” (
Tribune
editorial).

Mrs. Woodworth’s technique was charismatic to the point of mesmerism. Her followers fell often into ecstatic trances, during which they lay as if dead. These trances could last for hours or days, until those who experienced them came to at last, weeping and seeing angels.

Oakland doctors wrote letters to the papers, expressing concern about the effects of undiluted religion upon the weak-minded. Lizzie had read an article about one Albertson Smith, who, after attending one evening, was convinced he could fly. He leapt from the upper deck of the Oakland ferry, crashed onto the dock, and was taken into police custody.

But Mrs. Lake had actually gone to one of the winter meetings, and brought back a cautiously neutral report. The audience had by then swelled from an initial twenty-three Doom Sealers, as her followers were known, to several thousand. “It was all brimstone and the fiery pit,” she’d told Miss Stevens, Lizzie, and Nell. “Babies were crying. Women were screaming. Half the crowd was singing one hymn, the other half another. People of every color there, and all treated exactly alike. Outside, the wind, howling and snapping at the tent. I couldn’t hear Mrs. Woodworth at all, I could only just see her, standing at the altar with her arms raised in the air and bodies all around
her feet. There must have been twenty of them or more, stiff and lifeless as logs.

“Then, just when I was wishing I hadn’t come, just when I was thinking something cynical and worldly, I noticed my hands beginning to shake. They were all atingle, dancing around at the end of my arms, and I couldn’t control them. And then it was my legs and I slid to the floor as gently as if I were swimming through water. One of the men cupped his hands through the air above me, as if he saw the water, too, and I were being baptized. ‘Now you’ll see something beautiful,’ he said. Then everything went black except for one light I thought was a star, but it turned out to be the top of the tent.” She offered to take Lizzie along next time. “You’ll see that she has a power not easily explained,” Mrs. Lake said.

But Lizzie thought it didn’t sound quite the place for Episcopalians. She was joined in this sentiment by the bishop, who, in November, had issued a general instruction to stay away from women who preached. “Much good can be done by women in a quiet way,” he’d said. “There is no need to make a public parade out of praying for the sick.”

Privately Nell and Lizzie agreed that Mrs. Lake was among the more susceptible of God’s creations and had never had a cynical or worldly thought in her life. “I’d like to see anyone try to make me see angels,” said Nell, and Lizzie would have liked to see this, too.

Then Christmas had come and gone, and it was late January when Mrs. Woodworth had her vision. She’d seen a mountain of water rise out of the Pacific and fall on the
three cities of Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco. She’d pleaded with God, asking Him to spare the cities if ten righteous men could be found within them. His answer was that all the righteous should move immediately inland. His judgment on the unrighteous would take the form of a tidal wave.

This vision was shared by several of Mrs. Woodworth’s followers, who added their own details. The wave would hit on April 14, 1890, just after Easter. Chicago would be simultaneously destroyed, and also Milwaukee. Europe would be plunged into war. The Doom Sealers petitioned the governor, asking him to read the Book of Jonah, set aside a day for prayer, and remove all prisoners, monies, and securities in the San Francisco area to high ground. They published pamphlets. They quit their jobs, sold their homes and belongings, and left the city.

This was the context in which Mrs. Lake had her pupils praying at all hours, searching their souls for hidden sins as if it were an Easter egg hunt. They were studying the Dark Ages, and she played a dreadful game of tag for which she’d enlisted Ti Wong. She told him to walk up and down the aisles of the room, touching the students—boys and girls both!—at random on the shoulder. Everyone he touched was to go stand at the back of the room. When the game was over, a quarter of the class remained in their seats. The others were dead. It was an aid to understanding the great plagues of Europe. Mrs. Lake claimed she’d asked Ti Wong to participate because the plague came first from China.

Such a cruel lesson, so poorly timed, so unlike gentle Mrs. Lake. The game had given Minna Graham
nightmares; she’d been one of the last children touched. In her dreams, a great black bird circled her head and landed on her shoulder. She heard the rustle of its feathers in her ear and awoke crying, saying that it was pecking at her eyes. All the girls in the room with her were in a state. Mrs. Lake was sent off to the spa in Pope Valley to take the waters until she was herself again.

n
ell felt strongly that among the many ill-advised features of this game must be counted the encouragement Ti Wong had been given to touch the girls. She marched him up to the cupola, where Lizzie was sorting through recent donations, so that Lizzie could talk to him about this. Someone had actually donated a used pessary. Lizzie swept it quickly underneath a cotton skirt.

She had no intention of discussing the matter of touching white girls with Ti Wong, but since he was standing before her, waiting, she tried to think of something else to discuss.

“I go somewhere for you?” he asked. “Fetch something?”

“No,” Lizzie answered. “I don’t need a thing,” and
then she reconsidered. Somewhere here, on one of the tabletops, she had left the address Mrs. Pleasant had given her for headache medicine. She had tried to go once, but had not been able to communicate with the druggist, was not even sure she’d found the right place. She’d come away with candied ginger, pretending that was what she’d wanted all along, although she had no idea what to do with it, and eventually threw it away even though she could see it would never, ever spoil and maybe she would need it one day. It had represented a failure.

Now she rose and moved the stacks of books, the almost empty bottles of ink, the letter openers, the agate paperweight, the watch face with no innards, and a faded pincushion, filled with sawdust and shaped like a strawberry. Instead of seeds it was studded with glass-topped pins, and underneath was Mrs. Pleasant’s scrap of paper. Lizzie read the address aloud. “Could you find this place?” she asked Ti Wong.

“I know this place,” he said. “Hall of Joyful Relief.”