The Strange Case of Baby H (5 page)

No one slept well that night. The children fretted and the baby wailed for hours, refusing to be comforted with sips of water from a cup or with spoonfuls of thinned porridge. Clara felt uncomfortable on the hard ground under the oak tree. The air she breathed felt thick and heavy, and roots from the tree poked her in the back. She lay between her parents, listening to the night sounds—the shouting in the distance, the grunting of unfamiliar lodgers nearby, the crooning song Mother sang to the baby—and marveled at how everything could change in an instant.

But then she'd already learned that, hadn't she? Father's boat, strongly built and freshly painted, had been reduced to splintered boards in an instant. And Gideon, champion swimmer on the boy's team at the Sutro Baths, had sunk in an instant and drowned in the cold Pacific.

Miss you, Old Sock
, Clara thought sadly, staring into the darkness of the backyard.

Humphrey circled the tree three times, then lay pressed against Clara's feet. Finally, exhausted, they slept.

The morning after the earthquake dawned thick with smoke clouds overhead and the clang of alarm bells. Clara sat up in panic as a thudding boom made the ground tremble.

“It's another quake!” Mother wailed, reaching out for Baby H, who had been nestled for the night in a long dresser drawer.

“The end of the world,” murmured Father, lying next to Clara with his eyes still closed. “I'm ready… but I'm sorry for my Clara.”

“Father!” Clara shook his shoulder. “It's not the end of the world! It's another gas main exploding. Or—I don't know
what
it is!” She covered her ears as another boom, louder than the gas-main explosions, thundered in the distance.

“Sounds like war!” cried old Mr. Granger. He was struggling out of his bedroll over by the back fence. “I remember cannon fire at Gettysburg!”

“No,” called Miss Chandler. “Not war—it's dynamite! Remember what the officer told us yesterday. They must be blowing up buildings to create firebreaks that the flames cannot jump.”

Mrs. Grissinger and Mrs. Hansen helped their children to roll out of their blankets and quilts. Mother busied herself with changing the baby, and Clara helped Father into his wheelchair. They gathered by the stove. Mother directed Clara to start frying yesterday's leftover porridge into fritters while she herself made the coffee.

Everyone was talking in hushed tones about the explosions, and fear spread quietly among the group. Miss Ottilie Wheeler sat on a kitchen chair under the oak tree and stared into space. Her sister, Amelia, rubbed her shoulders and spoke to her in comforting tones. But everyone was frightened; they feared that the Curfmans' home—their safe haven—might not be so safe after all. From all over the city came booming explosions as homes fell. Mother whispered to Clara and Father that their house would be next, she just
knew
it. Why
shouldn't
further calamity strike them after so many other terrible things had happened?

“We're going to be all right, Alice. Calm yourself.” Father rolled his wheelchair over to the water barrel. “After all, people are being sent to Golden Gate Park for safety. You can see them passing in front of our house. And the park is only two blocks from us.”

“You were the one just predicting the end of the world, Frederick! Which is it?” Mother pressed her lips together, but her eyes were wide with worry. She had looked like that, Clara remembered, the morning Father and Gideon set off for their steamship journey down the coast—the trip that had cost Gideon his life.

The men who had marched off with the officer the night before had not returned. Their wives fed breakfast to the children and sat by themselves, murmuring uneasily to each other. Miss DuBois and Miss Chandler peeled potatoes. Old Mr. Granger entertained the Wheeler sisters with tales of battle in the War Between the States. Mother fed Baby H more of the thinned porridge. The baby slurped every bite off the spoon. Father guarded the water barrel and doled out scant cupfuls when people were thirsty.

Clara scanned the backyard. It had become quite a camp. Mattresses lay on the grass. Blankets aired on the washing line. Chairs and tables and even the leather settee had been carried from the house and set up in a makeshift parlor under the oak tree. The children climbed the tree and played on Clara's childhood swing. Baby H cried fretfully as Mother patted her back.

“Don't you cry, little lady,” Mr. Granger said to the baby. “I'll make you a swinging cradle out of that laundry basket!”

Clara watched Mother try to soothe the baby. Surely the baby was missing her own mother and father. Poor little orphan! Mother jostled the baby on her shoulder until Mr. Granger's swing was ready.

“There now, there's a lamb, my little Henrietta,” crooned Mother, settling the baby into the basket.

“Henrietta?” asked Clara in surprise, giving the basket a little push.

“Why, yes,” said Mother. “I've decided to call her Henrietta, after my dear old aunt. You remember, Clara. The one who lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven.”

Clara only vaguely remembered Aunt Henrietta, but she nodded.

“It's a good family name,” Mother continued, swinging the basket gently. “And of course we must call her something that begins with H, seeing as that's the letter on the rattle.”

“Of course,” agreed Clara. But the rattle in her skirt pocket felt heavy as she gazed out toward the street, wishing she could follow the people headed for the park two blocks away. Someone, somewhere, she felt certain, knew who this baby really was.

Satchel to Cliff House
. The words echoed in her head as she fingered the scrap of paper in her pocket.

The morning passed with background noises of explosions, alarms, and shouting—and the billowing smoke made everyone's eyes sting.
But we are the lucky ones
, Clara kept telling herself as she folded the bedclothes and tidied the yard.
We're not in the path of the explosions
, she reminded herself as she started boiling beans for lunch in a pot on their makeshift stove. Water might be scarce, but at least there would be enough to eat for a while.
And at least we can stay on our own property
, she thought as she stood by Father's wheelchair in front of the house and watched streams of homeless people straggle toward Golden Gate Park. At least she and her family would not need to join the soup lines … at least not yet.

“Let's follow along, Clara,” Father said suddenly. He craned his neck to watch the crowds round the corner at the end of the block, heading for the park. “I want to see what's happening. Can't just sit home forever twiddling our thumbs!”

Clara smiled tiredly. She knew Father hated feeling useless. He hated the numbness that afflicted his legs and made them too shaky for walking.
Nerve damage
, the doctors had pronounced after the shipwreck. Both legs had been broken when the wreckage slammed against them as Father tried to reach his son. After the broken bones had healed, doctors hoped that the feeling would return and the legs grow strong again. But here it was, nearly two years later, and still Father sat in his chair.

“I'd better check—” Clara began, then broke off, biting her lower lip. Mother would surely object to a trip to the park, or anywhere.
Stay home
, she would say.
Help out here, where I can keep you safe
. Clara shook back her tangled red hair and took hold of the wheelchair handles. “Aye-aye, Captain,” she said firmly.

It wasn't easy pushing the wheelchair through the streets. Her quick run over to Emmeline's house yesterday had taken her through quiet streets to the north. Now they were walking south, and the streets were choked with people pulling their belongings behind them in wagons or pushing them in prams. And if wagons and prams could make it to the park, Clara told herself determinedly, then so could a wheelchair. She steered the chair around piles of rubble. She had to stop and lay boards across a wide fissure that split the road, creating a bridge for the wheelchair to ride across. She hesitated, looking down into the crack. It was eighteen inches wide, and when she peered down into it, she saw nothing—only blackness.

The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickled the way they had before she first leaped from the highest diving board at the Sutro Baths. The way they did each time she paused at her brother's closed bedroom door and put her hand on the doorknob. She shivered when faced with the unknown. This crack in the street led down—how far? And—to what?

The center of the earth?

She gripped the handles hard, pushing down the flutter of panic, and trundled the wheelchair across the bridge. She did not look back.

Two blocks from their house, Clara and Father came to Golden Gate Park. The park had always been a haven from the bustle of city life. It was a glorious expanse of hundreds of acres stretching west to Ocean Beach and the vast Pacific. Clara had learned at school how the parkland had once been sand dunes—but that was hard to imagine whenever she strolled the exquisitely landscaped gravel paths winding around Stowe Lake, watching young men courting their lady friends out in the rowboats. She loved the tulip gardens surrounding the Dutch windmill. She loved the woods full of eucalyptus, Monterey pines, and cypress trees. She and Gideon had ridden on the merry-go-round and the live donkeys while their parents sipped tea in the Japanese Tea Garden on Sunday afternoons. Even after Gideon's death, Clara escaped to the park whenever she could. It was a place of both tame and wild beauty—with birds singing in every tree, and buffalo in their enclosed meadows grazing nearby. A peaceful place.

But not anymore. Clara and Father stopped on the corner across from the park entrance and stared.

The park was swarming with distraught families. Thousands of homeless people thronged the gates, arriving from all directions and stamping through flower beds as they headed for the food lines or the tents being erected by soldiers. Everyone was hauling belongings in carts, wagons, or wheelbarrows. Baby prams were piled high with dishes, pictures, birdcages, washtubs, dolls and toy trains, clothing, and books. Clara watched in amazement as several steamer trunks with roller skates attached to each corner were wheeled past her. She and Father almost laughed at the sight of another family all straining together to push their upright piano across the street and into the park. But it was too sad a sight, really, for laughter. This was the stuff of people's lives, and they were lucky to have any of it left.

Clara maneuvered Father's chair across the street and followed the crowds into the park. Large planks of wood had been nailed up between trees just inside the park's entrance gates to form a makeshift signboard. Near the signboard was a barrel of blank paper and a box of stubby pencils. Hundreds of notes already had been tacked up on the boards. Clara put the brake on Father's chair and stepped up to the signboard to get a closer look.

LOST!

Paul E. Hoffes, nine years old. Light complexioned, blue eyes. Please notify his mother. Panhandle in park, opposite Lyon Street entrance.

Mother is Looking:
Estelle, come to your Mother on the main drive of the Park.

Dan Mclntyre:
Your family is looking for you! At the South Dune, back of the Children's Playground, you will find a board reading “Mclntyre and Olsen Camp.”

—Your sister May

Clara tried to push Father's chair along the path but was hindered by the stream of people. Ahead of her she could see the green meadows covered by campsites. Families had erected shacks and strung blankets between the trees for privacy. No campfires were allowed, Clara read on signs posted on the trees. All food had to be eaten cold or be obtained from one of the soup lines.

“Mommy, Mommy, where are you?” howled a child, stumbling past and disappearing into the crowd.

“Turn back, Clara,” said Father. “This is a madhouse.” His voice was low-pitched, wretched with helplessness.

Clara obediently turned Father's wheelchair around. “I wish we could do something to help,” she said, staring over her shoulder after the child.

“Well, we can't,” he muttered. “Mother is right. There is enough to be tended to at home.”

They retraced their path through the desolate streets, over the boards bridging the fissure, past the piles of rubble, back toward their own house. As they approached, they saw Mother struggling on the front steps with another woman. Mother's voice was raised in anger. “Take your hands off this baby!” she shouted at the younger woman, who seemed to be trying to wrest the infant from Mother's arms. “I told you no, and I mean no!”

“Hold on, Father,” Clara said, and tightened her grip on the handles of his chair. She started running as fast as she dared, calling out, “We're coming, Mother! Hold on!”

“What in tarnation is going on here?” demanded Father as he and Clara jolted to a stop by the front porch.

Clara set the brake and raced up the steps to her mother's side. “Get away,” she yelled at the young woman who was tugging at the baby's blanket. “What do you think you're doing?”

The baby was crying, and suddenly the woman started crying, too. She looked to be not much older than Clara herself, actually—more a girl than a grown woman. She wore a ragged red dress, torn at one shoulder, the skirt partially covered by a grimy white apron. Her hair and eyes were both pale, nearly colorless, and her face was smudged. The tears cut paths through the soot on her cheeks.

“This is
my
baby,” she wailed. “You must give her to me!”

Clara reached out and intercepted the howling baby. Holding her close, she backed down the steps. “If this is your baby, why did you leave her with us?”

“It was the earthquake!” cried the young woman. “I was fleeing through the streets, and I was so frightened. I panicked … I thought this looked like a safe place … so I put her in your basket …”