The Immigrants (3 page)

and 80 percent.

In a community of Italian working people, where wages were low and unemployment and layoffs were fre quent, word of Anthony’s generosity—for they saw it as such—got around, and he found himself lending small sums here and there, and more and more frequently. Be cause of the very fact of his nature, he was almost al ways paid back, and within a year after the initial loan, he had become in himself a very small loan company. He asked for no security other than the character of the man who made the loan; he never harassed his debtors; and where it was necessary to extend the loan, he ex tended it.

It was from his son, Stephan, who went to school and read books, that he learned he was a usurer, and after he had confessed in church and grappled with his own guilts and surveyed his fortunes, he decided to give up moneylending. But the pressures of his countrymen were too great. He fixed his rate of interest, thereby, at 10 percent per annum. His profits were small; he con tinued to work as a mason, but more and more he found himself pressed into the role of banker for people who had no other place to turn.

In Joseph Lavette’s way of thinking, to borrow was to humble oneself. He had endured poverty and hope lessness and despair, but he had never stooped to bor row, and thus he saw it as surrender and humiliation. For weeks he held out against the urging of his wife, but finally his longing for a boat of his own overcame his pride, and he went to Anthony Cassala.

“I have never borrowed before,” he protested, “but if I borrow, you have my word as a man of honor—”

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He might have gone on and on, but Cassala put him at his ease.

“Please, do not lessen my pleasure,” Cassala insisted. “I have been waiting for you. The money is yours.”

In fact, the money was repaid in a single year, and Joseph Lavette found a friend whom he treasured. But now, the whole sum necessary for the purchase was in his pocket. “No school for Daniel for today,” he told his wife. “I go to buy a boat, and I will not do so without my son.”

“School is more important,” Anna said.

“Is the boat for me or for him?”

“He is nine years old. Leave the boy in peace.”

“Ah, women,” he said in disgust. “The boy goes with me.”

That day was one that remained with Dan Lavette all his life. Boat after boat—the wonder and mystery of the new gasoline-powered engines—the lore of boats, the cut of the bow, the curve of the side. A boat, his father explained, is a thing alive. Only when it lies at dockside is it quiet, supine; but when a man fishes, the boat is a part of his living existence. His livelihood and his life too can depend upon the boat. Finally, Joseph Lavette made his decision, and a power-driven fishing boat was theirs.

From that day on, the boy Daniel Lavette lived for Saturdays and for the two summer months when school was out. Each Saturday, before the sun was up in the morning, he was awakened by his father, shaking him gently and whispering, “Up, up, Danny. We fish to gether.”

Then dressing in the cold darkness before dawn, sit ting down half asleep to drink hot tea and eat his oat meal, while Anna protested the barbarism of awakening the child at this hour, then tramping down the steep hill, his hand in his father’s; how exciting, how wonderful life could be! Most mornings the bay lay under a feath-ery cover of mist and fog, before the sun rose and burned the mist away; then the excitement of making the boat ready. Usually, there

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was a boy to meet them, one of the Italian youngsters whom his father hired—but no more after Daniel turned twelve. Then he did a man’s work on the boat, and that was his greatest joy. He adored the enormous, strong, easygoing man who was his father, and he suffered through his school years, hating every one of them, dreaming only of the moment when summer vacation would come and he could spend all his days on the boat with his father.

The good days and the bad; the hot sun or the icy, pouring rain, a glassy bay that was like a fishpond or a raging, churning inferno that took all his father’s skill and seamanship to survive. So it went, and the years passed, and the boy who loved the sea became a long-limbed, self-confident young man.

“It’s in his blood,” Joseph told his wife proudly. “That boy is one damn fine seaman.”

Anna, on the other hand, had been undergoing the Americanization of the immigrant; she had other ideas, and she would plead with Joseph, “Why? Why must he be a fisherman?”

“And what is wrong with fishing? Haven’t I kept a roof over our heads and food on the table? I’m a fisher man. My father was a fisherman. Why shouldn’t my son be a fisherman?”

“Because this is America. It’s not Italy. This is San Francisco.

Italians are not peasants here; they are law yers and doctors and storekeepers.”

“We never had lawyers in our family. A lawyer is like a bloodsucker. Must my son be a bloodsucker?”

“He could be more than a fisherman. Every day when you go out, I pray to God, ‘Bring him back safely, please, please.’ Is that a life?”

“It’s a good life. I don’t force him. Ask him. He’s six teen years old. Ask him.”

But thinking about it, Joseph wondered. Again and again, during the long summer of 1905, he made mental notes to have a talk with his son. Perhaps Anna was right. But then he would ask himself

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what meaning there was to any of it if his son left the boat? When the summer ended, Dan announced that he would not re turn to school. He had a single year remaining to com plete high school; but, as he insisted, it was pointless. He had no interest in school.

He was a fisherman, as his father had been. Joseph tried to argue with him. Anna wept and pleaded, but already Dan Lavette, not yet turned seventeen, was his own man with his own mind, already an inch taller than his father, strong, a head of black, curly hair, dark eyes, a round face, and a firm chin. Self-sufficient, confident, he was not to be treated as a child, and that he made plain.

“I’m a fisherman,” he said. “That’s my life, and that’s what I want.”

Joseph gave in because he deeply wanted what his son wanted.

What is wrong with the life of a fisherman?
he asked himself. Compared to the months during which he had swung a hammer, working on the spur line of the Atchison Railroad, it was an almost heavenly existence. He now owned his own boat, which would be his son’s boat. San Francisco Bay was a place with a limitless harvest of fish; his flat was clean and not un comfortable; every night there was food on their table; and in any case, his ancestors had been fishermen for uncounted generations. He had learned to speak the language, and he was no longer a blind and voiceless immigrant, to be cheated and driven aimlessly by chance and necessity. And he was in a city that was a place of beauty, a city of high hills and open vistas where day in and day out the air was washed clean by the cool winds of the Pacific, and where there were thousands of Italians, most of them immigrants like himself.

And there was his friend, Anthony Cassala, and his wife, Maria, who loved Anna. How much more could a man ask of life?

The year was 1906—almost seventeen years since Joseph Lavette and his wife, Anna, had come to San Francisco.

On Wednesday, the eighteenth of April, in 1906, the city of San Francisco was the proud queen of the Pa cific Coast of the United

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States. It had all the attributes and virtues and sins that history requires of a great city, a population of about four hundred and twenty-five thousand, great hotels, splendid mansions of the rich, wretched hovels of the poor, churches, cathedrals, syn agogues, colleges, hospitals, libraries, a political ma chine that competed with Tammany Hall of New York in rapacity and unconcealed mendac-ity, a city boss named Abe Ruef, a hundred or so wealthy families who displayed their new riches and vulgarity with the same lack of selfconsciousness that they displayed toward the piracy of Abe Ruef, and, at the other end of the scale, a criminal element that was already world-famous.

This criminal element ruled and inhabited a district of the city known as the “Tenderloin,” or more widely as “the Barbary Coast,”

a section more or less defined within the limits of Grant Avenue, Clay Street, Broad way, and the waterfront, and appropriately named after the pirate-infested coast of North Africa. Here was a free and dangerous jungle of whores, purse-snatchers, hoodlums, pimps, confidence men, murderers, and thieves of every variety; but since they preyed for the most part on themselves and on seamen off the ships and on citizens who were foolish enough or daring enough to venture into the Tenderloin, the ruling elite of the city tolerated them and their city within a city.

Some five years before this morning of April 18, the teamsters, who were the lifeblood of the city, went on strike. It was a long, violent strike, with no quarter asked and none given, and out of it there came into being a sort of political workers’ party, known as the Union Labor Party, and in the election of 1902, the candidate of this party, Eugene E. Schmitz, a leader of the Musicians’ Union, was elected mayor of San Fran cisco. But as with so many other dreams of organized labor, this one went up in smoke, or as so many put it, down in garbage. Schmitz could only boast that he himself was not a crook; but he was weak and easily cor rupted by

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the crooks who still ran the city, and he gave them full sway and an open field.

Such, very briefly, was the situation of the city on the morning of April 18, 1906. On that morning, a few minutes before 4:00 a.m., Daniel Lavette awakened and looked at the clock next to his bed.

His mother and father were still asleep. “Let them sleep,” he told him self. It was not the first time he had awakened this early and gone down to the wharf and made the boat ready, so that his father, after a precious extra hour or two of sleep, would come down and find the boat ready to slip its moorings. It gave Dan a good feeling, a sense of his own manhood.

In the kitchen, he made a breakfast of crackers and milk. When his father joined him later, there would be a jug of hot coffee and wine and sandwiches for their noonday meal; now he would not even risk the slight noise of setting water to boil.

Loping down the steep hill to the wharf, he enjoyed as always the sense of being entirely alone in the sleep ing city, in the gray broken night that was the dawning, the wonderful feeling of discovery and renewal that al ways came with watching the first tint of the sunrise.

At the wharf, he leaped onto the boat with the easy agility of youth, stowed away his oilskins, and began to take the nets from the lockers. He glanced up, almost as an act of worship, as the first ray of the rising sun broke through the mist, thinking to himself that if he ever found a girl he was really stuck on, this would be the place and the hour to win her. Then his glance went to the ferry building, where the big clock read thirteen minutes after five o’clock. He took out his own watch to check the time, and then, as he looked at it, the noise began, a great, monstrous rumble of sound, as if the whole world had begun to scream in agony.

At that moment, deep in the bowels of the earth, one great plate of the North American continent, pressing against and building up pressure against another great plate, found the strain unendurable,

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and the earth slipped. Deep under San Francisco, the earth began to tremble and vibrate. There was the sound of a great, inhuman beast growling and roaring, and then the sta ble eternal earth shook and trembled like a mass of jelly, and for forty-eight awful seconds this trembling continued. Brick buildings collapsed, furniture danced and skittered, plaster ceilings crumbled and fell, tall, steel-reinforced structures rocked and swayed yet stood firm, but the older buildings of stone and wood crum bled in upon themselves.

Yet when the main shock was over and the thousands of half-dressed or half-naked citizens poured out into the comparative safety of the open streets, they still had no notion of the appalling tragedy that would overtake their city. Strangely enough, the earthquake itself had done fairly modest damage, for 90 percent of the city was constructed in frame houses, and they withstand an earthquake best; but in the poorest sections of the city and in the Tenderloin, the oldest structures collapsed; wood and oil-burning stoves overturned; water mains were broken; and the fire began.

So quickly did the fire begin that it appeared to be an integral part of the earthquake. Dan was flung into the cockpit of the boat, and he lay there while the boat rocked and tossed crazily. Again and again, he tried to get to his feet, and again and again the tossing boat flung him back to the deck. When he finally maintained his balance for a moment, the aftershock began and flung him back on the deck. Bruised and battered, he fought to stand up, clawed his way out onto the dock—and now the city was burning. Only minutes had passed, and the city was burning.

For perhaps three or four minutes, Dan stood there, looking up at the ruined city on its wonderful tumbled hills, listening to a new sound, the sound of terror and panic and roaring flames, and then he remembered that he had left his mother and father asleep. He began to run.

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Afterward, he had no memory of running up the hill, no memory of anything except the burning building and the crowd of half-naked people standing in the street. When he tried to rush into the building, hands grabbed him and held him. He wept, screamed, pleaded, but still a hand held him, and the old, dry frame tenement building where he had left his parents asleep went up like a torch and folded in on itself.

It was such a fire as no city in America had ever experienced before. For three days it burned, and it consumed four square miles of San Francisco. From the waterfront to Van Ness Avenue to Dolores Street to 20th Street to Howard and to Bryant and then over to the Southern Pacific Depot and then down to the bay again, wiping out the Barbary Coast and the homes of the poor and homes of the rich, too, and the new seven-million-dollar city hall and schools and libraries and churches, five hundred and twenty-one square blocks, over twenty-eight thousand buildings, and almost four hundred human beings dead in the ashes. And for weeks thereafter, smoke rose from the ruins.