The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

  So quickly did the fire begin that it appeared to bean 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.

  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.

  Yet in every tragedy, no matter how great, no matter how pervading, there are the lucky and the unlucky. Anthony Cassala was one of the lucky ones. His small frame house, on Folsom Street beyond the edge of the fire-burned area, was almost undisturbed by the earthquake and untouched by the flames. He was a decent human being, reasonably clever yet at the same time rather simple, and he thanked God devoutly for his good fortune. He believed in all sincerity that he had been spared for a reason, and since his only function which might constitute a reason was to lend money, he accepted that function. The catastrophe was too enormous for him to probe any deeper into cause and reason.

  Three days after the earthquake, when the first moments of sanity began to return to the ruined city, Anthony Cassala considered himself and his circumstances. He had cash assets of almost eighteen hundred dollars in his home, which was more cash than most of the wealthiest citizens had at that moment. The poor had nothing but the few dollars in their pockets, if indeed they had not been burned out. Those who were burned out had nothing at all–only the robes and trousers and pajamas they were lucky enough to wrap around them.

  For the great banks of San Francisco, the great repositories of money and power and wealth, were almost all located within the area that had been burned. Crocker National Bank, Wells Fargo, the California Bank–all of them buried under debris and burned timbers, their vaults sealed shut by the heat, metal safes twisted and melted. These and other giants of high finance conferred with each other, with city and government and army officials, and took measures to keep the burned-out city alive. At Anthony Cassala’s house, where already twenty-two human souls were being given refuge and food by his wife, Maria, things functioned on a smaller and more intimate scale. The Italian working people who had fled from their homes half naked, taking nothing with them in their terror as the earth heaved and rolled, wanted for the most essential and immediate necessities, clothing and food and survival for the next hours–and many of them turned to Anthony Cassala.

  So on this Saturday morning, three days after the earthquake struck, he sat at his kitchen table with his son, Stephan, beside him. Stephan had a pen and an open ledger. Anthony had a pile of bills and silver dollars in front of him, the dwindling remains of some eighteen hundred dollars in cash which he had hidden in his house when the earthquake struck. He was doling it out five and ten and twenty dollars at a time, while Stephan entered the name of each borrower in the ledger. By half-past eight in the morning, the money was gone. There remained only a list of names in the ledger and the gigantic confusion of a house packed full of homeless people, men, women, and many, many children.

  There remained also a notion that had come to Anthony Cassala during all of this–that if these poor working people had left their money with him, somehow it would be available to them now. He said to himself that as soon as things quieted down and the city became a place to live in once more, he would find out something about banks. He felt a desperate need to be alone and to think. He said to his son, “Everyone comes here but Lavette.”

  “Yes, papa.”

  “You see Lavette?”

  “No, papa,” Stephan said.

  “Yes, papa, no, papa–” He stood up, looking around the crowded kitchen, women nursing babies, children howling, his wife, Maria, stirring an enormous pot on the stove, three men staring dumbly out of a window.

  “Papa,” Stephan said. “They are both dead–Anna and Joseph both.”

  “What!”

  “They are caught in the house and burned. I saw it yesterday. The house burned down. There is nothing left.”

  “You see it, you tell me that! How do you know?” he demanded fiercely. “How do you know they dead?”

  “The policeman told me, papa.”

  “God save me,” he said in Italian, and turned to his wife. “Did you hear that, Maria–did you hear what Stephan said?”

  She stood at the stove dumbly, tears rolling down her cheeks. One of the men at the window, a plasterer by the name of Cambria, burst into a torrent of words. He had been locked in silence. Now he had a chance to say something. He lived three houses from the Lavettes. He and his wife and his children ran into the street with the first shock. The Lavette house had burst into flames, like an explosion. Lavette, his wife, and his son, Daniel, lived in an apartment on the third floor. They were trapped there, trapped and destroyed.

  “All of them? The boy too?”

  Where else would the boy be at five o’clock in the morning? Cambria began to explain how he had looked for a priest, but Cassala could listen to no more and he fled from the house into the smoky haze that still covered the city. The firebreak, where they had blasted dozens of houses to stop the flames, was only half a mile from his home, and here he entered into the gates of hell, a whole city reduced to ashes and blackened timbers and piles of rubble. Everywhere, soldiers with fixed bayonets stood guard, and Cassala moved past them apprehensively, for the city was full of stories that the soldiers had killed more people than the earthquake. He was not alone. Hundreds of people were moving slowly on the streets, and families stood in little dusters, looking silently at the blackened ruins that had been their homes.

  His friend, Joseph Lavette, had lived on Howard Street, and there Cassala made his way, but as he picked his way among the ruins, he was unable even to determine which was the house, nor did he know exactly what he searched for, charred bodies, confirmation of death, hope of life. And how his memories tortured him! Joseph Lavette had been like a brother to him, Daniel like his own child. After the older Lavette had borrowed five hundred dollars from Cassala to make the down payment on the fishing boat, his gratitude for a loan based on nothing but faith and friendship impelled him to make his boat a Sunday excursion vessel for the two families.

  Now, making his way down Market Street toward the waterfront, Gassala recalled all the wonderful Sundays sailing on the bay, putting in at some cove to picnic on good bread and salami and ham and pasta and wine. Was it possible that now it was over and done with and finished, just as everything else in this blackened wasteland was finished?–Yet he went on now, drawn by some faint hope that the boat at least had survived, so that he might look at it and touch s
omething of the old time and the old life.

  The wharf was alive, just as the bay was alive. Over the past three days, the fishermen in their fishing boats, among other boats, had taken more than a hundred thousand people, some fleeing the fire, others driven by their own terror, across the bay into the safety of Oakland; and they were still making the passage back and forth, bringing food and medicine and physicians and government officials into the ruined city, bringing back from Oakland boatloads of those who had fled–just as for months to come, every boat in existence would be called into service to bring food and building materials as well to the city.

  A soot-grimed, weary fisherman pointed down the wharf. “There’s the Lavette boat.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “He’s dead,” the fisherman said. “The kid’s alive.”

  “God be praised,” Cassala whispered. “God be praised.”

  He ran down the length of the wharf, and there was Lavette’s thirtytwo-foot powerboat, tied up, secure and safe, and in the cargo well, sprawled out and sound asleep, Daniel Lavette. Cassala climbed down into the boat, so moved by the sight of young Lavette, asleep and sound with three days of beard on his face and no sign of hurt or injury, that he could have embraced him and kissed him as he would his own son. It was the sleep of total fatigue, and the boy had not even bothered to take off his heavy boots or his jacket. Cassala recognized this; on the other hand, this was no place for an exhausted, grief-ridden boy to sleep, here on his boat and alone. And for all Cassala knew, he had not eaten during the three days since the earthquake.

  Cassala shook him. “Danny, Danny, wake up.”

  “You won’t wake him easy, Tony,” a voice said. Cassala turned around, and there on the wharf was Mark Levy, the chandler whose store was at the end of the wharf, and looking down the wharf, past where Levy stood, Cassala saw that his shop had survived, scorched at one corner and tilting somewhat, but otherwise whole and undamaged. Levy was only twenty-six years old, skinny and long-nosed, an easygoing and competent young man who had taken over the chandler shop five years before when his father died. To Cassala, who had come into this place again and again to buy small gifts for the Lavettes, the Levy store was a veritable wonderland, selling every conceivable item a boatman or fisherman might need, nets and rope and lanterns and compasses and sails and oars, a tangled, jumbled general store of the sea.

  Now Levy looked at Cassala curiously, the general question that was being asked everywhere in the city left unspoken.

  “Not harmed,” Cassala said. “The fire don’t reach us, no harm, thank God. But poor Lavette and Anna, they are dead, no?”

  “That’s what the kid said. He said he woke up about four-thirty, maybe a little earlier, and went down the hill to make the boat ready. He left them both asleep. He was at the boat when the quake came, and then he ran back but the house was in flames. He went a little crazy, and Jeff Peters, who was with him, said he had to hold him down on the ground to keep him out of the house. My wife, Sarah, found him sitting in the boat a few hours later, just sitting there and crying like a kid. Do you know what he’s been doing for the past three days? Ferrying people to Oakland. They just poured into the boat and shoved their money at him. This is the time he’s slept in three days.”

  “We wake him up and I take him home with me,” Cassala said. “He can’t sleep there. It’s no good. He got to eat He got to be with his people.”

  It was like waking a drugged man, but the two of them got Dan Lavette on his feet, where be stood swaying, his eyes half closed, his long-limbed six-foot-two-inch body looming over them, staring at Mark Levy and at Anthony Cassala without recognition.

  Softly, in Italian, Cassala said, “It’s me, Danny, Tony, and I know about your grief. Your father was like a brother to me, and you will be like a son. Now, come home with me.”

  “My boat,” the boy said, clinging to the only part of his life that remained. “I can’t leave my boat.”

  “I’ll take care of the boat, Danny,” Levy said. “Go with him now.”

  All the way back to the Cassala house, Dan Lavette remained silent, and wisely enough Anthony did not urge him to speak or to share his grief. Only when he was seated at the kitchen table in the Cassala house, with a dozen people welcoming him back from the dead, with the two Cassala children staring at him in wide-eyed wonder, and with a great plate of spaghetti in front of him, did he come to life, and suddenly ravenously hungry, he began to stuff himself with the food.

  “Slow, slow, Danny,” Maria Cassala said. “There’s plenty food. Eat slow.”

  The boy finished the plate and then another plate. He drained down a tumbler full of red wine–and he smiled, slowly, tentatively.

  “Thank you, Tony, Maria–”

  “You be all right, Danny.”

  “The city’s gone–mom and pop gone. I’ll be all right. I got the boat.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be all right, Tony. I’m just tired.”

  “Sure. You sleep now.”

  The boy reached into the pockets of his jacket and his hands emerged with fistfuls of bills. Again and again, he dipped into the big pockets of the jacket, piling paper money, gold coins, and silver dollars on the kitchen table. A sudden silence fell over the crowded kitchen, and the men and women and children gathered around the table, watching the pile of money grow. It came from his jacket, from his trousers, from every pocket. Then, when his pockets were empty, he pushed the pile of money toward Cassala, who sat across the table from him.

  “I no understand,” Cassala whispered.

  “I didn’t steal it, Tony,” the boy said. “They wanted to go to Oakland. They were like people gone crazy. They emptied their pockets and gave it to me, and then they climbed over each other to get into the boat. It wasn’t only me–all the boats. Ten dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars–it didn’t matter they were so crazy with fear. For three days I have been taking the boat across to Oakland and back, and this is the money they gave me. So take it and keep it for me.”

  Cassala stared at the boy for a long moment, and then he nodded. He counted the money carefully. “Here, Daniel Lavette,” he said formally in Italian, “is the sum of four thousand and seventy-three dollars and twenty cents. I accept the custody of this money in your name. It is like a deposit in a bank. When you need it, it will be yours, whatever part of it you desire or all of it. Meanwhile, I shall pay you six percent interest and use the money–if that is agreeable to you?”

  “I think I understand you,” Dan said, “but my Italian is not so good.”

  In broken English, Cassala repeated his proposal. Now Dan could hardly keep his eyes open. He grinned and nodded, and said, “Sure, Tony–whatever you say.”

  “Maria,” Cassala said to his wife, “make a bed for him where he can sleep. Let him bathe and rest.” And to Stephan, “Bring the ledger here.”

  That, more or less, is how the Bank of Sonoma came into being; the business process was less romantic. A year later, with the advice of an attorney, Anthony Cassala issued and sold a hundred thousand shares of stock at ten dollars a share. A new, incredible, and vibrant metropolis was rising out of the ashes of the old city, and a part of it was a small but dignified storefront on Montgomery Street that bore the legend THE BANK OF SONOMA.

  PART ONE

  Fisherman’s Wharf

  Perhaps never before in history–or since for that matter–did a new city arise from the ashes of the old as quickly, as hopefully, as vitally as San Francisco. Almost five square miles in the heart of the city had been turned into blackened timbers and ashes. For seventy-two hours, men, women, children, firemen, soldiers, and policemen fought the flames, and shortly after seven o’clock on Saturday morning, the twenty-first of April in 1906, the fire was brought under control and its advance was halted. Already families were making their way up Howard Street and Folsom Street, clambering up California Street and Washington Street and all the other avenues and streets within the wasted area.
Regular army soldiers and National Guardsmen tried to bar their way–having maintained looting rights to themselves over the past three days, but not even the threat of guns and bayonets could deter the homeowners from claiming their particular bit of ashes.

  In the Tenderloin, saloon operators, pimps, and prostitutes picked among the ashes looking for coins or cashboxes that might have survived the holocaust, for there not a building had been spared. The tall hills that only a few days before had sparkled with light and reflected the rising sun so cheerfully from their thousands of white clapboard houses were now somberly black, but not dead; indeed they had taken on a strange and grim majesty, and the still half-naked citizens, soot-blackened and homeless, greeted the ruin as they had always greeted their city. Had the world ever seen such a sight before? Go elsewhere? Live in another place? Be damned if they would!

  The next day, it rained, and the fire was out for good. A week later teams were hauling the rubble down the steep hills and dumping it into the bay. Tents sprang up on the blackened lots. Thousands of ordinary citizens joined in the effort of clearing the rubble, and cots appeared in the foundations of burned houses with makeshift lean-tos to keep out the weather. Men who had never handled a hammer or saw before turned carpenter. For almost nine weeks, the shattered city, known not only as the “Queen of the Pacific” but as the “queen of larceny” as well, entered into a period of benign brotherhood, common effort, good humor, and good will; and during this time, crime almost disappeared from the streets of San Francisco. Money in the form of relief as well as paid insurance poured into the city, and every out-of-work carpenter and mason from a thousand miles around descended upon it. Ships loaded with food made the journey across the bay from Oakland and from Southern California and from the states of Washington and Oregon, and the common kitchens and the breadlines were orderly and good-humored.