I will fetch and carry and sew on buttons and lay out nightgowns but I will not be a spy.
If you ask me, that girl just needs to breathe some fresh air and get away from both her parents, Mrs. Sump’s yammering and Mr. Sump treating her like a doll.
Now I will tell you how long it took to get Mrs. Sump into her splendid gown! Oof! Thirty buttons down her back, twenty buttons on her gloves, the diamond headpiece placed just so, the pearls clasped around her throat. Once we were done she looked rather majestic, I must admit. If there was a surface on her person that was unadorned, I did not see it. She wore face powder, too. She left with a wide smile, holding on to Mr. Sump’s arm, ready to show off.
I hope Mr. Caruso doesn’t get blinded by all that magnificence and fall off the stage.
I took her some soup at eight o’clock and she told me she was just going to bed and not to disturb her.
It’s odd how families work. Mrs. Sump bullies Lily and snipes at her. Mama and I worked together. We knew what needed to be done and we did it. We all worked in the tavern, we all pitched in because that’s the way families work, isn’t it?
But there are secrets in this house, and nobody seems to listen to anybody else.
I miss Mama. My heart is aching. I am sorry I shouted at her before I left. I am sorry I didn’t kiss her good-bye. I will write to her tomorrow.
April 18, 1906
Wednesday
6:30 A.M.
I never thought I would survive to write this.
My hand shakes and I don’t know if I can make the pencil move.
Yet if I don’t set it down, if I don’t make sense of it —
I must write it so some of the horror can leave me and rest on the page instead.
I am sitting outside of a ruined house. I’m sorry for my handwriting, diary, but I can’t seem to stop my trembling.
When I woke at five to my alarm (the clock given to me by Mrs. Sump to make sure I would awaken), the sky was just beginning to lighten to gray. I had gone to bed at two. I was wearing Lily’s nightgown but I knew the others would not be up at this hour so I threw a shawl around me and quickly ran down the back stairs to light the fire in the kitchen before I dressed. I had to get the things I’d need to kindle the fires in the bedrooms. While I was in the kitchen I got out the coffeepot, for that was what Mr. Sump preferred, and the tea things. All that was in my head was the list of what Mrs. Sump told me I must do: fires lit by six, tea at seven in my room, coffee for Mr. Sump in the study, newspapers laid out in dining room, full breakfast at eight thirty.
I had already lit the coal stove when I heard a noise behind me. Suddenly Lily was in the kitchen, dressed in a plain dark dress and hat — my dress! And carrying my suitcase!
We just stared at each other for a minute, and I saw that she recognized her nightgown on me. And so at the same time we each burst out with questions.
What are you doing in my gown?
What are you doing with my case?
And being that I was the servant I had to answer first, and I told her I had taken the gown to mend — I showed her the tear — but I needed nightclothes because I thought my case had been stolen.
And then she looked embarrassed and looked down at the suitcase in her hand. I knew she realized she had no choice but to confide in me.
She said she was leaving, running away. She told me I had to help. She said she’d pay me back, she knew she shouldn’t have taken the case with my things, but it was easier to leave as a working girl than to leave as a swell, where they could track her. This way it was a disguise.
“Help me,” she said. Her eyes pleaded with me. I’d never seen so much emotion in her face. I realize now that she must have learned to keep her face still and set like a mask to hide what she was feeling from her mother.
“You helped me yesterday,” she said. “You knew I left the house.”
“I won’t spy on you for them,” I said. “But this is different.”
“All you have to do is say nothing at all. Say you didn’t see me.”
And I said, “But why are you running away?”
And she smiled, but not like it was directed at me, that smile. She smiled to herself.
She said: “I am running to something.”
And as she said it the rumble started.
I had a second or two to be confused about the noise. I decided it must be the cable for the cable cars, that maybe they wound it up in the mornings and maybe it rumbled, and so I would feel that underneath the ground every morning and one day it would be a familiar noise.
Just as I decided this, the rumble got louder and became a roar, and then I felt the power of it, so terrifying that Lily and I reached out to grab each other but it was as though the house gave a twist and we were thrown away from each other instead.
The noise grew and grew until it was deafening, like a train was running through the kitchen. The house began to shake with a violence that made Lily and me cry out in terror. Everything in the kitchen — plates, cups, table, chairs, bins, platters, pots, pans — began to shake and shatter. The knowledge roared into my head.
EARTHQUAKE.
So many things happened at the same time that my senses were overwhelmed. Plaster fell, first in a fine cloud and then chunks of it from the ceiling. The floor was moving in a wave but also bumping up and down, making the furniture give great lurches across the floor.
The house was alive. It had us in its jaws and it shook us without mercy. I had one last chance to look into Lily’s eyes and I am sure her terror was like my own. I tried to reach for her again but I was thrown backward, right through the doorway into the butler’s pantry. I hung on to the door frame as the stove tore loose and danced across the room. To my horror it slammed into Lily and she fell on the floor with a scream. I dropped to my knees and tried to crawl toward her. Part of the ceiling crashed down in front of me and I felt a pain that seemed to burn through me. Clouds of dust suffocated me and I choked and choked, trying to breathe, trying to see.
There seemed to be a pause of a second or two and then the shaking got even worse. Through the haze I saw something incredible, the back wall of the kitchen moving. Then the wall fell with a thundering roar — I heard Lily’s scream cut short — and I could no longer discern the difference between the bellow of the earth and the clamor of a house coming apart.
Something fell on top of me and the breath was knocked out of me. All was dark. I was sure I was dying.
The shaking stopped. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything at first. My eyes stung and my throat was raw. I could move my arms but not my feet. I felt my legs and guessed that I was somehow pinned underneath plaster, but I didn’t think my legs were broken because I could wiggle my toes. I was able to get my arms out. I cried for help several times, but that just exhausted me.
Slowly, I wriggled out one arm and began to pick the plaster and bricks off my body. Now that the dust was settling I saw that a chair had fallen over me in such a way that it had saved my life. Chunks of plaster and bricks had fallen, but only a few on me. When I pushed off the chair I was able to sit upright and then wriggle my way out.
My legs were bruised and I had a gash on my ankle and my shoulder, but I was alive.
I flipped over onto my knees. I was face-to-face with the bricks on the floor and I realized that they must be from the chimney. It had crashed straight through the roof.
I raised myself up and saw that the house had cracked like an egg. I saw plaster and wood and tiles, and I couldn’t imagine why they were on the kitchen floor. I looked out and saw the pale crescent moon. It was then that I realized that the roof had collapsed.
Did the world split open? That’s how it felt. I could hear, faintly, the sound of church bells, and although I knew they were ringing because of the shaking from the quake, had most likely been ringing all along, it felt like they were tolling for the end of the world.
I called for Lily. There was no answer.
I cr
awled forward and saw her arm, her fingers curled and unmoving. She was covered in bricks and plaster and wood.
The church bells stopped, or maybe the roaring in my ears did, for suddenly it was so quiet. That’s what was so odd, after all that crashing and roaring, the quiet was the most absolute I ever heard.
I was afraid to move any farther. I was afraid something would crash on me again. Terror kept me on my knees for long moments.
“Lily!” I whispered. “Please.”
Finally I gathered my courage and scrambled over the plaster and bricks and managed to take hold of her hand. There was no answering squeeze.
I began to toss the bricks off, and the chunks of plaster and the wood slats, sobbing and choking, and finally I found her shoulder, and then her face, staring up at me with sightless eyes.
I can’t think of it now. If I think of it now, I can’t stop seeing it. I’ll never stop seeing it, the horror of her staring eyes, and the blood.
I crawled backward and then rose. My legs were shaking. I was afraid to touch anything — a wall, a piece of furniture. I couldn’t trust anything anymore, not even the ground underneath me. Nothing was solid anymore, and I wonder if it will ever be again.
On the floor I saw something familiar — the cracked red leather, the faded gold script: RECIPES. I snatched you up, diary, and hugged you. You were the only thing I had to hang on to.
I picked my way back toward the front of the house. The grand draperies had fallen and the front bow window had shaken loose and crashed into the street. I could not get into the parlor, for the chimney had crashed inside the room. In the grand hall the furniture had shifted and some chairs had toppled. Smashed china and glass lay over the floor. The chandelier looked as though it would fall at any moment — I could see the exposed wire. Mrs. Sump’s big Chinese vases had smashed. As I passed the study I saw books all over the floor but the ceiling was still intact.
I stopped at the bottom of the staircase, afraid to climb. I tried to call to the Sumps, but my voice was hoarse and cracked and I only choked and coughed instead. I stood there for a moment gathering my courage. Finally I made my legs move. I was afraid of what I might find but I was more afraid that I would have to tell them about Lily.
But I didn’t have to tell them.
As I gained the landing and turned, I was able to see to the top of the staircase and I saw Mr. Sump in his nightclothes, his face gray with dust, sitting with his back against the wall. I hurried up the stairs but as I came closer I saw his eyes, staring at me with the ghost of the last great shock of his life. He did not look harmed. It must have been his heart.
He was trying to get to the stairs, that was clear. I tried to get past without looking and nearly kicked his watch, the gold pocket watch he wound with such a satisfied air.
I realized when I turned toward the bedrooms that where the roof and chimneys had fallen at the back of the house was right where Mrs. Sump’s bedroom was. She, of course, had the bedroom with the best view.
I stood in the doorway of Mrs. Sump’s room and there were bricks and tiles and debris everywhere. The chimney had brought down the roof with it and crashed right through the floor of her room.
Mrs. Sump had made it out of the bed. She was lying on the floor. The massive marble fireplace mantel had fallen on her. She was gone, too.
So they were spared hearing that their daughter was dead, at least.
How was this possible, three lives gone? And mine spared? I couldn’t seem to grasp that, I couldn’t seem to make sense of the house now, some of the rooms half-buried and some just rearranged.
I was shaking so badly and suddenly so cold. I went into Lily’s room. The bed had moved up against the wall and a vase had smashed but she would have survived if she’d been here. I took a dressing gown from her closet and put it around me, tucking you, diary, inside.
And then suddenly the terror came back over me, dropped over my head like a black cloak. What if the house just shrugged its shoulders and came down on top of me? What if the shaking began again?
I ran back down the stairs and outside. I took gulps of the air. My legs gave way and I sat on the lawn.
Destruction around me, chimneys down and things smashed but nothing like the back of a house just falling off, the roof caving in. The Sumps have suffered the worst on this block, at least. There are clouds of dust rising from downtown. A thin plume of smoke. Beyond, the tranquil bay.
And silence. Such silence.
I would have been killed if I’d been in my room.
Poor Lily.
I sat there, crying for Lily and holding my journal, and then when the shaking wasn’t so bad I untied the string and found the pencil tucked inside, and I wrote this all down.
April 18, 1906
Wednesday
7:15 A.M.
Two hours have passed and I have lived through a lifetime. I have found a place to sit in Union Square while I write this next entry. I am safe here in the open square, gathered with others who have fled their damaged homes. They are mostly poor. The damage has been extensive south of Market Street — south of the Slot, they call it. That’s where the cheap rooming houses and hotels and apartments are located. They are fleeing the fires down there. We can see the smoke but we feel quite safe here.
I’m surrounded by people pushing and pulling trunks and carts piled with household goods, anything they could grab by the looks of it, food and quilts and pans and hairbrushes and boots. Some of them are in their nightclothes. I saw a short, stout man in a coat and what looked like pajamas standing there shaking his head, and someone whispered that it was the famous opera singer Enrico Caruso. He left with a few people for the St. Francis Hotel on Powell Street. I hear they are serving breakfast.
There is such a strange mix of the normal and the completely odd. Coffee and rolls while across the square a building’s front is gone. I can see rescuers moving through the rooms, looking for survivors. I hear there are people trapped in fallen buildings on Mission Street, still alive, as the fire approaches. I can’t think of the poor souls. I hope the firemen can put out the fire soon.
This morning as I sat outside the house immediately after the quake I felt I was the only person alive in the world. Then people began to pour out of their houses, some in their dressing gowns, some obviously dressed hurriedly and missing boots or vests. One woman walked by me with a satin evening cloak thrown over her nightgown. The front of a house down the block had simply fallen off. I could see a bedroom and an easy chair. Bricks and mortar were everywhere. A chimney had fallen on a house next door. Once I looked around I realized that there was not one chimney still standing on the whole block.
A man and a woman walked past, holding the hands of two children, and the children looked solemn and calm. You’d expect them to be crying, wouldn’t you? The mother was carrying a birdcage with a parrot in it. The father, a clock. Where they were going, I didn’t know at the time, but I imagine they were heading to the waterfront and the ferry.
The city was so quiet. No clang of the cable car, no noise of the streetcar. The sun was rising, and as it rose I could see more clearly that there was a cloud over downtown, hanging in the air, from the collapsed buildings. I heard a rumble and started in fear but realized it must be the noise of a building giving up and collapsing somewhere downtown.
I wondered what the back of the Sumps’ house looked like — the part that was now collapsed — but I was afraid to look. I did not want to catch a glimpse of poor Lily again. As it is, the sight of her will live in my mind’s eye forever.
An automobile pulled up in front of the house. It was the same Oldsmobile that picked us up from the station. A short man with a beard jumped out and ran to me. He was dressed impeccably in a dark suit and hat, his shirt snowy white. I marveled that he had the presence of mind to dress so carefully on this day. He introduced himself as Mr. Crandall, Mr. Sump’s lawyer, and asked if everyone was all right.
It was that simple question that brok
e whatever hold I had left on my wits. I burst into sobs. I couldn’t get any words out. Finally between hiccups I got out some words, strewn like the bricks from the chimney — I couldn’t seem to build them into sentences. “Everyone dead,” I said. “Roof . . . chimney . . . awful . . .” The sobs were so violent I felt my chest squeezing like a bellows.
“Compose yourself, my dear.” He took my handkerchief and pressed it against my face. It came back gray with dust. “Are you sure?” he asked, but I couldn’t answer.
He disappeared into the house. When he came out he looked shaken. He said how sorry he was and as soon as he could locate an ambulance or someone he would send them, but of course everyone was still trying to rescue those who were trapped and still living.
Then he noticed the blood on Lily’s dressing gown and asked if I was all right, and I said that I just had bruises and scrapes.
He stood looking at me a moment, and I could tell he was thinking hard, trying to devise a plan through all this madness. “You can’t stay here,” he said. “You’ll have to come with me. You’ll need to dress,” he added, looking away.
Of course I was still wearing Lily’s nightgown. I wrapped my arms around myself and rose. My teeth chattered and I realized my bare feet were icy cold: I could barely feel them.
I was afraid to enter the house alone. He said he’d come with me and so I stepped over the threshold once more and began to cry again.
He smoothed his mustache with one hand and then smiled reassuringly. He said he was sure the house was solid but we must hurry. Together we went up the stairs.
Mercifully he had placed a blanket over Mr. Sump.
The attic rooms were wrecked, so I went to Lily’s room. I was able to find a shirtwaist and a gray wool skirt trimmed in blue velvet. I took Lily’s blue coat, thinking I might need something warm. I found underthings and stockings. Gloves. Lily’s boots were a bit too big for me but I pulled them on.
A City Tossed and Broken Page 5