Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  “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.

  Harriet gripped Jenny’s hand. We looked around us and at each other. We didn’t know where to go. Then we did know—the right place to run was away from the tall, rolling breaker of black soot and smoke rapidly advancing on us. Gerald, after a hesitation for which I could hardly blame him, slung me over his shoulder and ran with me, and now he’s in my will, and so shall that nurse be, if I can discover her name.

  He carried me for an astonishing amount of time, two or three roaring city blocks, and at last we were far enough out for it to seem safe to put me down. We were all together—Constance, Harriet, Jennifer, the nurse, Gerald, and I—and they were all panting from the exertion, and I was panting with only the excuse of fear. I thanked Gerald, and then there was another explosion, of which I heard just the beginning, because it temporarily deafened me. Having been hurled to the ground, I rose in a gray mist of dust, through which, when it cleared, I could see just enough of Jenny’s dress to identify her. Her head was under a slab of masonry. Grimacing and straining—and grunting, probably—Gerald and Constance lifted the block, forced themselves to look under it; then they put it down beside her, careful not to look again. We were in a heap of charred bricks and splintered sticks. A limestone fragment said institut, with the final “e” gone, and another said he fine arts.

  The nurse stood over Harriet, who lay partly buried under bricks, coated with white dust, her upper body in an odd, broken-looking posture. Then Harriet spoke, which was startling, like a marble statue coming to life. But I was still deaf, so I couldn’t hear what she said. I felt myself cough—from the dust and smoke. I wondered i
f my deafness would be permanent, and exactly then all the sounds came back: the crackle of the fire, the roar of wind, distant shouting, motors, bells, Constance and Gerald coughing, and Harriet’s frail voice gasping, “—with Jenny. I had her. Jenny. Oh, my Jenny, my Jenny, Jenny. Tell me, Frances.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had never permitted myself to feel anything at all for Jenny, and I had never really liked Harriet, though I felt sorry for her now.

  “My foolish baby,” wailed Harriet.

  I decided that since she would be dead soon anyway I could lie. “She’s hurt her leg. She’ll have to be carried, but I don’t think it’s serious.”

  “You’re a liar. Tell me.”

  “But, Harriet, it’s the truth. Ask Constance. Constance?”

  “She’s just lamed,” agreed Constance, with enough conviction to inspire belief in someone who wanted to live a little longer in hope.

  Harriet wasn’t like that. “I’m dying,” she moaned. “My poor foolish baby is dead, and I’m next. Why? Why me? Why my baby?”

  I tried to please her. “We’re in the hands of God, Harriet.” I knew how religious she was. “Whatever happens, it’s God’s will.”

  “How can it be God’s will that my baby should be dead and I’m to be dead in a few minutes, good people like us, while you go on gulling the world?”

  What did she mean? Did she know who I used to be? No, I decided. She just knew what I was now. She knew I was bad.

  I heard Constance intervene, “Don’t talk; don’t tire yourself,” and to me: “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “It’s not so important that I deceive people, Harriet, so long as they act as if they are deceived,” I said thoughtfully as the others picked up the pieces of rubble burying her. “But as to why and who, isn’t that in God’s hands? We are told He has His reasons for sometimes taking the good before the wicked, and that all accounts will be settled in heaven. Then you and your daughter will be among the saints, and where will I be?”

  “In a lake of fire,” said Harriet, and I felt as if I knew her for the first time. She was my old enemy, the Good Christian Woman.

  “She’s in a delirium,” Constance explained anxiously. “What if you live, Harriet?” she asked, and it was quite revealing. I had not known they were so frightened of me. It was more than I had intended.

  I thought: how informative earthquakes are. The locks break, the safes open, people run out of the house in their linen.

  Harriet insisted, “I want the Lord to take me.”

  Soon enough, she took a last grimacing breath. She exhaled. The breath kept coming out of her like steam heat until it was gone, her pupils grew, she looked smaller, and none of us doubted that she was dead but we were glad to have an expert, a nurse, on hand to make it official; and to tell us that now we could leave her and save our own lives.

  What do you want to know now? Did I survive? I’m writing this, aren’t I? We walked to safety. The nurse returned to her job on foot. The rest of us were taken by ferry to a tent camp in Oakland. That evening, when I needed to wash my face, someone brought me a bucket of water and a cake of Pears soap.

  BY FRIDAY, MRS. FLYNN HAD MANAGED to hire a wagon to take all of us—Gerald, Flo, Mrs. Flynn, and me—to a hotel in Sacramento, but first we spent a night in a camp on Lake Merritt, where people who had been destitute before the earthquake mingled indiscriminately with people of means. There were rows of squat canvas tents, long lines of people waiting to be fed, carrying the tin plates they’d been given at the end of another line, men in black coats and fedoras and bowler hats, women in long skirts and shawls, girls in jackets and short skirts, boys in short pants. Some of the children were crying or sulking; others played, as young children will amid awful disasters. We had a large satchel full of bread, jam, ham, goose-liver pâté, mustard, olives, and cheese wedges, all rescued from my larder the day before, and so we were spared the indignity of the tin plate and food line. It was another clear day, but dust was falling on us: residue of the burning city.

  In the morning, Mrs. Flynn reported that she had found a driver. I was thanking her when I interrupted myself to ask, “Why is that woman staring at us?”

  She was coming away from the breakfast line, tin plate laden with slop, an old woman. Her clothes were no dirtier than ours, but beneath the grime was the drabness of innumerable washdays. She had aged in a very particular way. The crow’s-feet around her eyes had lengthened until they overtook the rest of her face; every wrinkle was a road to the corner of her left or right eye. Her least appetizing feature was a loose upper plate that she kept moving about in her mouth with noisy clicking and slurping.

  “Belle?” she said as she came close enough to be heard without shouting. No one had called me that for many years.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” Mrs. Flynn told her.

  “Belle Cora?”

  She was only a few feet away now.

  “Get rid of her,” I commanded Mrs. Flynn, who understood the urgency of this matter immediately. Mrs. Flynn knew me from the old days.

  “There’s no one with that name here,” said Mrs. Flynn.

  “I know her! Belle, look at me.”

  “Get tough with her,” I instructed my housekeeper.

  “If you don’t leave us, there’ll be trouble,” said Mrs. Flynn.

  “I’m just a poor old woman! What are you afraid of?”

  “Mrs. Andersen does not know you. She does not wish to know you. She’s had a very difficult couple of days, and she simply cannot concern herself with your troubles right now. Clearly, you’ve had a hard time, too; we don’t wish you any harm, so, please, don’t persist, don’t make us ask that you be removed from the camp. You don’t want that. We don’t want it, either. Just go. We won’t say another word.” Mrs. Flynn had been reaching into her bag; now she took out a five-dollar bill. “Mrs. Andersen wants you to have this.”

  The woman didn’t have a purse or bag; she just stood there, holding the tin plate with one hand and clutching the bill with the other. She looked at it and wept. “I need it, God knows. Yesterday I’d have been too proud.”

  Mrs. Flynn put her arm around the woman’s shoulder. “I know. I know …”

  The woman said, “Yes, thank you, I’m sorry,” and began to walk off, to my relief, but abruptly she turned and cried out: “I’m Antoinette! Don’t you know me, Belle? It’s Antoinette!” For a second the name meant nothing. Then it all came back. I remembered that face when men wanted to kiss it, and how the first tentative marks that would become those looping lines would appear around her eyes when she was happy. I remembered that ruined mouth with fine teeth in it and a toothache she’d had and a dentist I had paid to pull the tooth, and I remembered commenting that women of our sort must take care of their teeth, that she should use tooth powder and dentists and eat more white foods. I remembered that she liked sweets, and I remembered that she liked hop.

  I looked at her, and I thought, why not? What did it matter really, after all these years, and at my advanced age, and what we’d all just been through? What had I to lose? A great deal, in fact. But I felt for a moment as if it were nothing, for we were in the camp, outside society, in a kind of parenthesis cut off from the regular flow of life.

  Those were my thoughts and my reasons for disregarding my policy of over forty years, and revealing myself to someone who remembered me by my old name.

  “Antoinette,” I said. “Mrs. Flynn, it’s all right. Leave us alone for a little while.”

  I embraced this decrepit old woman with much more emotion than I had known when embracing my neighbors two days earlier. We felt all the losses of the intervening years at once. We wept. I think she wept sincerely, even though less than half an hour later she was trying to blackmail me, as she had probably intended to do from the moment she realized who I was.

  We sat on my luggage and shared my picnic food. Chewing gave her such trouble that I supposed she would have been happier with the mush in the
tin plate. She told me, first, of her recent adventures—she ran a boarding house on Valencia Street, south of Market, where the earthquake itself pulled down buildings and made the street buckle.

  We talked about old times, about other American women with French names, and where they ended up, and how they died. Georgette, who had been thrifty, became a madam in Denver, got rich, made bad investments, took arsenic. Suzette, who would give you her shirt, ended up in a two-bit knocking shop in New York and took some other poison—Antoinette wasn’t sure what exactly, she believed carbolic acid, very painful and bloody—this had happened under highly theatrical circumstances in a miserable dive on Doyers Street, with the owner, a big Irish brute, shouting, “Not here, you don’t!” and reaching her too late to knock the vial from her grasp. Michelle, after changing her name to “Dr. Winifred Dorcas, Discreet Female Physician,” died at thirty-five, insane from syphilis (so I told Antoinette). Monique perished of a botched abortion, not at the hands of Michelle (again, my information). Francesca, after losing her arm as a consequence of wounds sustained in a knife fight with another girl, continued in the profession until she succumbed to alcoholism at the age of twenty-six. The lovely Angelique, always funny and unpredictable, became wilder and wilder, and went from house to house, and was beaten to death by a customer (or, as we’d have called him in those days, “a gentleman”).

  We wept over these women, for we were more sentimental now than when we were hard-hearted enough to live that life, and we said, of the many others whose ultimate fate we didn’t know, that probably they had enjoyed lives of relatively normal length. We said hopefully that perhaps the reason we hadn’t heard about them was that they had survived. They had changed their ways, and changed their names, and lived in a manner that permitted them to escape notice.