A Race to Splendor

by Ciji Ware

By this time, she was trembling uncontrollably, her frightened state made worse when she caught sight of a woman’s hand clasping a crumpled tin wash bucket nestled among the debris.

  The poor soul… it could have been me… the poor soul… rang in her head like a hideous nursery rhyme.

  Amelia quickly turned away from the mangled corpse and limped to the Montgomery Street side of the shattered structure. She knew from her engineering studies that the force of the shaking had turned solid mortar into grains of sand and transformed the building’s foundation into liquefied earth. That, and the simple Law of Gravity, caused huge chunks of the building’s facade to crash into the street, leaving a twisted superstructure that now resembled a rusted, empty birdcage. In the distance, Amelia heard the clanging bells of fire brigades and the occasional muffled explosion. She knew there would be gas pipes erupting, coal stoves overturned.

  She sank onto a pile of debris as a tremendous well of fear and grief filled her chest. Like a water main rupturing, the pressure reached the bursting point and she covered her face with her hands. She cried for Zachary Webb and his daughter Josie, whom she’d never even met. She cried for the woman who’d died with a wash bucket in her hand, for a father who never came home at night—and for a mother who’d never come home at all. And for her elderly aunt, haunted by her own, long-ago traumas, across the water in Oakland.

  Finally, she cried for San Francisco.

  ***

  At length, Amelia rose to her feet to stagger uncertainly toward the bay. Lurching onwards, she was continually overtaken by scores of battered San Franciscans fleeing their homes. Women and small children, many swathed in bandages, struggled with all manner of household items: quilts and cook pots, family portraits and sewing machines. Men wielded wheelbarrows piled high with clothing and books, even a wicker cat-carrier or two, and carts overflowed with everything from bedsteads to teakettles.

  “I left a note tacked to Lotta’s Fountain,” she heard one fellow say who was pushing a pram with an ornate mantel clock where a baby normally reclined. “Maybe someone in the family’ll see it and know we’re alive.”

  “If they’re alive, maybe they will,” his companion replied.

  At the waterfront Amelia witnessed a sickening spectacle as anxious crowds pressed toward a lone approaching vessel. Then, without warning, the earth roiled beneath her feet once again and a wail rose in unison from the crowds waiting in long lines at the wharves, people and property pitched against each other.

  “Aftershock!” someone cried, a word tragically familiar to San Franciscans after the recurrent temblors of 1898.

  Amelia imitated seasoned veterans crouching and covering their heads. The jolt lasted only a second or two but seemed much longer. It felt to Amelia as if the Apocalypse was at hand.

  The ferry hooted a warning to alert deckhands and stevedores to prepare for docking. The instant the Berkeley bumped against its mooring, the desperate throng surged forward as one body, ladies elbowing children out of their path, men casting women aside—all scrambling to be first when the gangplank was lowered.

  Slowly, Amelia rose to her feet and joined the swelling tide of humanity.

  “I hear Oakland’s not hit too bad,” a woman confided to her companion in a low voice. “Heard it from a deckhand on the first boat over this mornin’. Think that no good brother of yours’ll take us in?”

  Just then, Amelia was shoved aside by a gentleman in black evening clothes sheeted with white dust. Amelia seized his filthy sleeve and angrily pushed back. “For heaven’s sake, sir! Could you please—?”

  Their eyes locked in a startled look of recognition. “Mr. Kemp! Are you all right?” Amelia exclaimed, gazing at her father’s erstwhile poker partner.

  Ezra Kemp’s barrel chest and broad shoulders loomed over Amelia as he regarded her shocking dishevelment. He noted the blood and bruises. “And you, Miss Bradshaw?”

  “I’m alive,” she replied, taking in his tattered sleeves and dirty face. “Where were you when it hit? I was at the top of 456 Montgomery.”

  “At five a.m.?”

  “I work at night and had a deadline for a design project for Julia Morgan. Most of the building collapsed.”

  Kemp gestured toward a scene reminiscent of a Matthew Brady Civil War daguerreotype. Rubble was scattered everywhere, and the acrid smell of smoke from Market Street intensified by the minute.

  Kemp jabbed a stubby finger at the prevailing chaos. “All the water mains burst, so there’s no means to fight the fires. A member of the brigade told me that the fire chief fell two stories and is probably dead by now. The city’s doomed, Miss Bradshaw. Get yourself across the bay and stay there,” he ordered gruffly.

  “That is exactly what I am attempting to do,” she retorted. “I’m terribly worried about my aunt in Oakland and—” She hesitated and then asked a hopeless question. “By chance, have you seen my father?”

  Kemp didn’t answer as he forced his considerable bulk past anyone standing between him and the gangway.

  “Mr. Kemp!” she cried, attempting to follow him. He turned at the sound of her voice. “This ferry is going to Oakland. Don’t you live in Mill Valley? Won’t you step aside and let me—”

  Ezra Kemp ignored her desperate plea and turned toward the docks. Furious at his indifference, she shouted, “At least have the decency to tell me if you’ve see my father?”

  To her surprise, Kemp looked back, calling out over his shoulder, “He’s probably still at the Bay View.”

  “At the hotel? Have you actually seen him?”

  “Yes,” Kemp yelled over the heads of the surging throng. “At about five a.m. this morning, wagering his very last penny.”

  Without another word, he thrust aside a young boy clinging to his mother’s hand and climbed on board the Berkeley seconds before a harried deckhand pulled up the gangway. Ezra Kemp might reside to the north, but the lumber magnate was obviously hell bent on fleeing the city any way he could—and saving his own hide.

  ***

  The ferry set off east across the bay while Amelia headed west, back into the grim remains of the city, weaving her way past chunks of masonry and twisted trolley tracks and setting out for the Bay View atop Nob Hill. Despite the devastation surrounding her, she was buoyed by the hope that her father was alive. She hurried onward, the crowds flowing in the opposite direction like a raging river toward the bay.

  Soon she began the arduous climb up California Street. The higher she scaled the incline, the less quake damage she witnessed. Several open-air horseless carriages, packed with sightseers, whizzed by. She was amazed, in fact, by the carnival atmosphere prevailing in San Francisco’s upper-class district, some of whose residents were heading downhill to enjoy firsthand observations of the collapsed docks and shattered structures along the waterfront.

  A boy interrupted his game of hopscotch and pointed at her bloodstained shirtwaist. “Hey, lady, what’s it like downtown? Musta been pretty bad down there, huh? Seen any dead bodies? Did ya know your hair’s all white? Those are some mighty nasty cuts on yer forehead.”

  Amelia ignored him and sped toward the top of the hill. Panting by the time she finally reached the summit, she turned right onto Taylor Street and paused to catch her breath.

  “Oh, thank goodness…” she murmured.

  Her favorite cluster of Victorian-style mansions belonging to the Big Four railroad barons, Crocker, Huntington, Stanford, and Hopkins, along with the new Fairmont Hotel—all built on the hill’s foundation of bedrock—appeared relatively unharmed. Alarmingly, though, bells on the fire trucks were clanging a quarter-mile away in Chinatown.

  Four blocks farther down the crest of Nob Hill, she caught a comforting glimpse of one of the Bay View’s turrets. Just the sight of the place was reassuring, but, as she drew nearer, her hope soon turned to horror.

  In contrast to other buildings on Taylor Street, every chimney of her grandfather’s hotel had crumbled, leaving jagged holes along the massive shing
led roof and shattering windows and walls on the Jackson Street side. Why had Charlie Hunter’s pride and joy suffered such terrible damage and not other buildings in this neighborhood rooted in Nob Hill’s sheet of basalt and serpentine? Why was the grand old lady listing treacherously to the east, appearing as if it might tumble down the hill toward the bay?

  And then the truth hit her full force.

  “Oh God! No!” screamed Amelia, limping faster down the incline of Jackson Street.

  The recent addition of the gambling club built by Ezra Kemp and J.D. Thayer on the downhill side of the property had completely collapsed, taking with it some of the older sections of the original building and severely damaging its roof. As she’d learned from Lacy Fiske, the designer hired by Thayer and Kemp to build the annex to the hotel was a mere dandy in spats that barely knew his architectural ABC’s, let alone how to calculate the load-bearing requirements of a structure built on a hill. Surveying the extensive wreckage, Amelia felt sick to her stomach.

  Bruised and battered hotel guests wandered aimlessly in the street or sat on paving stones, looking like lost children as they watched her pass by. At the bottom of the hill, the nine blocks of Chinatown had been reduced by the upheaval into piles of oversized kindling. Orange pockmarks of flame dotted the landscape below.

  Amelia lifted her skirts and hobbled down a narrow slate path toward the remains of the newer building, her aching muscles protesting each step. She searched for safe entry into the annex that had suffered such terrible damage, peering through a yawning hole in a wall that had—for the few weeks of its existence—kept prying eyes from well-heeled nobs hazarding thousands of dollars on a single hand of cards.

  Now the interior was merely a jumble of fallen gas lighting fixtures, piles of bricks and mortar, heaps of wood, and a long, elaborate cherry wood bar toppled onto its face. Two-thirds of the roof lay open to the sky. Amelia leaned forward and squinted into the gloom, steadying herself against an exposed four-by-four whose splintered surface pressed painfully into her lacerated palm.

  “Father!” she shouted. “Henry Bradshaw, are you in here?”

  Her cries were greeted by ghostly silence. An act of God had changed J.D. Thayer’s glittering gambling den into a pile of rubbish. Against the only interior wall of the club left standing, Amelia could barely distinguish the outline of several upholstered sofas piled high with debris. On one, beneath five-foot mounds of plaster and wood, a length of crimson silk and the slender arm of a woman lay limply amidst the rubble. Amelia had overheard scuttlebutt that female Chinese “hostesses” were employed here for the enjoyment of a select clientele at the new club. Here was the gruesome proof.

  And Father? Please, God, don’t let my father be—

  Weak from her own ordeal and dismayed by everything in view, Amelia cast one last frightened glance around the shattered room and saw no other signs of life. Maybe her father had the sense to call it a night before the quake struck. Perhaps, for once, Henry Bradshaw had done the sensible thing and joined the chaotic throng jockeying to board the first boat to Oakland, even beating Ezra Kemp in his ignoble retreat.

  By now, huge clouds of black smoke downtown tarred the sky, tendrils belching a mile high. Could an entire city burn to the ground, Amelia wondered.

  Just then, a ragged voice called out, weak and rasping.

  “Help… Please help.”

  She gazed down into the club’s devastation from the street’s higher elevation, barely able to make out the shadowy figure of a man slumped against a doorjamb with a small dog curled up at his side. It was difficult to determine that the man’s hair, sprinkled with plaster dust, was nearly as dark as his fashionable evening clothes. Dried blood crusted his battered face.

  Amelia immediately recognized her grandfather’s dog, Barbary, who normally slept in the basement and had somehow survived the cataclysmic events upstairs. Then she saw that J.D. Thayer was painfully pulling himself to a standing position. He clung to the threshold with one arm and stretched the other toward her in a gesture of abject supplication. His face contorted in agony and he paused as if he were gathering his very last ounce of strength.

  “Please… I beg of you. Help us! The roof’s caved in on—”

  Thayer’s voice broke as he gazed toward the couch where the woman’s arm, partially cloaked in red Chinese silk, protruded from a pile of debris. He pulled his eyes from the corpse and turned his head to stare at Amelia through the gloom, recognition dawning.

  “Please… I know I have no right… but in God’s name… can you help me?”

  Chapter 6

  Amelia gazed past the ruins at the new owner of the Bay View Hotel, now a pathetic-looking creature huddling less than fifteen feet away, his gaze pleading. The cuts on his head looked deep and his voice sounded reedy. How could she ignore the suffering of a fellow human at a time like this, even if he’d wreaked havoc on her life? But who could come to his aid?

  “Of course I’ll try to help you, Mr. Thayer,” she assured him across the wreckage, “but you must tell me whom I can summon for you here.”

  Thayer looked at her strangely as if some discomforting thought just occurred to him. “Oh God…” he said and then fell silent.

  Amelia, the last person he’d expected as a potential rescuer, stood at the edge of the broken wall that overlooked the devastation below. It was impossible to envision how posh this establishment had appeared only a few hours earlier. The San Francisco Call had been rhapsodic in its description of the club’s elegant gaming tables, expensive mahogany paneling, rich Persian carpets, and discreet nooks where all manner of business was transacted. What wasn’t reported was the inadequate foundations or the private rooms in the adjacent hotel reserved for romantic assignations—or so went the rumors.

  As of five fifteen that morning, the entire place looked as if a barrage of cannon fire ripped through all four walls and pummeled the occupants, including Thayer. Amelia found her gaze once more drifting toward the pale arm of a woman buried beneath a pile of plaster and bricks. She quickly looked away, remembering her own near brush with death.

  “Don’t risk coming down here,” Thayer called out, wincing at his effort to speak. “Just send help. The rest of the roof may cave in. I can barely breathe. I think I’ve broken my ribs. Ling Lee… has been crushed.”

  “Oh no! That’s your… friend? I’m so terribly sorry.”

  Thayer, having spoken the woman’s name, closed his eyes and fell silent, as if incapable of saying more. He slipped to his knees once again, head bowed as Barbary pressed closer to him. The only other man Amelia had ever witnessed weep was her drunken father, begging to gain admittance at the door of the Hunter Family suite after a particularly extended binge of drinking when she was nine years old.

  Unlike Henry Bradshaw’s harsh sobs, Thayer made no sound now, but remained mute, shoulders heaving. His former air of confidence and command had vanished, and in its place was the raw vulnerability of a man who had faced forces he could not possibly control. Like she, he’d been laid waste by the earthquake’s stark, vicious impartiality and Amelia felt a sudden, irrational kinship with a fellow survivor.

  Despite Thayer’s warnings, she cautiously made her way deeper into the pit of rubble and knelt by his side, lightly placing a hand on his dust-covered shoulder, her fingertips leaving an impression where she touched his dark dinner jacket. Barbary gazed up at her, his terrier tail giving a few, desultory wags. The animal appeared to have transferred his allegiance to the hotel’s new owner, for he licked Thayer’s dust covered hand and then rested his furry head on his thigh.

  “Hello, Barbary,” she murmured, and then turned her attention to Thayer. “We must get you medical attention right away.”

  “You shouldn’t be down here,” he muttered. “It’s too dangerous.” He raised one arm across his chest and encased her hand that was resting on his shoulder with his own, a joining of two wounded souls. His palm felt cold and Amelia guessed that by now, he was probabl
y suffering from shock.

  “You’re very kind,” he murmured, closing his eyes. “More than I deserve. I can hardly move and—”

  “Then you must rest here awhile and I’ll see if I can find someone to help. Things are rather desperate downtown,” she confessed reluctantly. She peered past a shattered wall in the direction of the street, wondering if any hotel guests were wandering about that could lend a hand. “The fires appear to be spreading downtown something fierce. Perhaps someone on Taylor Street could—”

  Thayer’s lids fluttered open and he stared at her. His brows suddenly knit together and then he murmured, “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

  To Amelia, the man again seemed amazingly close to tears. Thayer’s chin sank to his chest and he shook his head in little motions of despair. “I think… he’s over there,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Near Ling Lee.”

  A stab of dread, sudden and real, clutched at her. “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  “What? Where?” She scanned the wreckage in disbelief that anyone else could have survived the collapse of the building.

  Thayer nodded in the direction of a gaming table that was minus its legs.

  “The table and chandelier fell on him… right after he dove for cover.”

  A gigantic brass gasolier that once hung overhead had made a bull’s-eye landing on the top of its green baize surface.

  “Dear God!” Amelia searched for a path to make her way across the shattered room where the city’s high rollers had entertained themselves, and where her father apparently lay entombed.

  “Don’t go over there!” Thayer grimaced each time he spoke. “There’s nothing you can do… on your own.”

  Amelia ignored his directive and, instead, worked her way on all fours until she reached the middle of what was left of the room.

  “This table?”

  Battling panic, she didn’t hear Thayer’s response for she had caught sight of a gentleman’s dress shoe and spats covered with a layer of white powder.