A City Tossed and Broken

by Judy Blundell

  Well, it made a soft bed, and I couldn’t afford to be choosy.

  I think one of the Jennardis put a blanket over me, because now I have it to hold around my shoulders.

  The fire is out.

  All is black and smoking. Soot and muck. But the fire is out.

  I can see from here, at the top of the park, the ruined city. San Francisco is a city tossed and broken, but from what I saw last night, it will survive.

  I think I must have met a dozen Jennardis last night. Jake; his brother, Joseph; his sister, Beatrice; his cousin Robert; several cousins whose names I did not catch; his uncle Angelo; his mother and father; his aunt . . . and a baby called Rose.

  People are lying all around me, exhausted from last night. Thousands were on the streets, helping to fight the fire. Thousands of hands, beating at the flames, thousands of boots, stamping on the cinders.

  My name over the course of the past twenty-four hours has been shortened from “Philadelphia” to “Philly,” and now I am merely “Phil” to the Jennardis.

  “Phil, bring another jug, will you?”

  “Phil, can you hold the baby?”

  Honestly, diary, I do not know who I am anymore. But I know I feel safe with the Jennardis. I wish . . . I don’t know what I wish. We have been too busy to really talk, but I wish I could tell Jake about the spot I’m in. About how I let Mr. Crandall think I was Lily. About the strongbox and the ledger and how I want to save my family and how I was tempted to be Lily because it just seemed easier to have money than not.

  And how seeing those firemen drag themselves up that hill when they were exhausted, seeing the steam rise off their rubber coats, seeing the heat overtake them and yet seeing them rise again and take their place on the line . . . that it changed me.

  What did that fireman say that night on Nob Hill? That it surprised him when people took advantage of disaster. I feel such a deep shame when I remember that. Because that is what I’m doing. Taking advantage of disaster and taking advantage of poor Lily Sump.

  I am going to tell the truth to Mr. Crandall when I see him. Just knowing that makes me feel better. I will tell him about the ledger and ask him to restore my family’s fortunes and just hope that he will do the right thing. Maybe the disaster has changed him, too.

  The Jennardis have set up a feeding station. They had loaded up a wagon with everything they could from their grocery, knowing that food would be needed. For hours today we stood and handed out what food they had. Cheese, sausage, olives, tinned sardines.

  I asked Jake if the store had burned, and he said he didn’t know. Certainly the rest of the foodstuffs they had to leave have spoiled. “No telling what we’ll find or what we’ll be able to salvage. Have to wait until things cool off to check the safe. Could have lost everything,” he said, but his tone was cheerful. “Pop says starting from scratch isn’t so bad if you have enough friends.” He said friends with extra meaning and for the first time since I left Philadelphia I felt at home in the world.

  I just realized while writing this that the weather has changed. It is chilly, the mildness of the air gone. And I realize that the sky above me is not full of smoke, but clouds.

  I feel something on my face, my hands. I jump away, afraid of cinders.

  Then I realize what it is, and I lift my face to the sky, to the blessing that is falling on us.

  Rain.

  Later

  11 P.M.

  The rain will put out whatever embers are left. The city is safe.

  I am not.

  I forgot of course how much could go wrong so quickly.

  I was slicing oranges for the children in Mission Park when I saw Mr. Crandall walking toward me.

  “Lily!”

  My mouth went dry as fear pumped through me. Jake was standing right next to me, helping his mother to chop the stale bread, which will be toasted and then thrown into the vegetable soup.

  Mr. Crandall said he’d been looking everywhere for me, and he looked truly exhausted. I told him I was sorry, and that I was planning to go to him when I finished with the food line (and here he looked at the line and back at me, as if to say, Lily Sump is feeding refugees?)

  Jake turned to me with his easy smile. “So. I finally discover your name. Lily.”

  “I —”

  Mr. Crandall took notice of Jake in his shabby working clothes, his grimy cap.

  He nodded politely.

  “Thank you for looking after Miss Sump.”

  “Miss Sump?”

  Oh, Jake, I prayed, please don’t give me away. I could see it in his face, how he knew that I couldn’t be a fine lady, he had met me in a kitchen with my hands full of carrots.

  “I’m sure we’re very grateful.” Mr. Crandall fished in his pocket and held out a coin. Jake just looked at it. Then he looked at me.

  “This is Mr. Crandall,” I said. “My father’s attorney.”

  “Your father . . .”

  “My father and mother were killed in the quake,” I said. “And our maid, Minnie Bonner. Mr. Crandall found me that morning and has taken care of me ever since. Otherwise I don’t know what would have happened to me. I am alone.” I emphasized that last word, alone, hoping he would sympathize in even one small way.

  “Minnie Bonner.” Jake repeated the name. “The maid, you say.” I saw that he didn’t quite understand, but something happened behind his eyes, and I knew I was no longer his friend.

  He took a step back. He stuck his hands in his pockets, refusing the coin. “No, thank you, sir,” he said. “The Jennardis don’t believe in profiting from disaster.”

  The words sliced me to ribbons. How I wished I could explain! But within a moment Mr. Crandall had taken my arm and led me away.

  Now I am in Mrs. Crandall’s sister’s house, a pretty cottage with a view of an enormous hill with two identical crests. It is called Twin Peaks. When the fog rolls in, it spills around the two crests, leaving Mrs. Flynn’s neighborhood bathed in bright sunshine.

  I’ve been given the nicest guest room, which makes me ashamed, because of course I only got it because I was Lily Sump. Mrs. Crandall’s sister — Mrs. Flynn — is very kind. She gave me a salve for my blistered palms and wrapped my hands in bandages.

  She is sharper than Mrs. Crandall, however. Earlier we were sitting in the parlor and she was going over what was in the larder — food is scarce — and lamenting that she only had a few eggs left and no hope of getting more. What could she do with only three eggs? I suggested she whip the eggs into a mayonnaise and stir it into the fish soup. I asked her if she had garlic. Papa had taught me this trick.

  She stopped what she was doing and gave me a quick surprised glance, for what rich man’s daughter knows how to make a garlic mayonnaise?

  I said I used to slip downstairs to the kitchen and talk to the cook in Philadelphia.

  “I see,” she murmured.

  I then spoiled my explanation by rising in order to clear the table. I sat down quickly with a thump. I don’t think she noticed.

  It is not easy to remember that I am a rich girl who never spent time in a tavern kitchen, never cleared a table.

  The sisters are polite to each other, but it’s rather like the past three days — dynamite could go off at any moment.

  Tomorrow I am going to tell Mr. Crandall the truth.

  April 22, 1906

  Sunday

  4 P.M.

  Oh, diary, I am trapped worse than before.

  This afternoon Mr. Crandall called me into the study. He had skipped church in order to walk to Russian Hill to check on his house. It is still standing — the neighbors who remained were able to save his, as it stood in the middle of the ones they were saving. Mrs. Crandall is already making plans to return.

  He asked if I had something to tell him. I felt my heart start to beat so quickly. My face flushed. He saw my discomfort and sighed.

  Then he told me that upon inspecting his house he met a young man who was searching for me. Could I gue
ss who that was? I said no, my heart still threatening to leap out of my chest.

  “Your fiancé,” he said.

  My face registered my shock, but luckily he thought I was only surprised at being caught out.

  “You might have told me,” he said.

  I couldn’t speak, which he took for embarrassment. I was remembering Lily’s face in the moments right before the world exploded. I am running to something, she had said. Now I know what she was planning. Not to run away, but to run away with someone and get married.

  She was in love. That was the light I saw in her eyes.

  “He has been searching the city for you,” he said. “He was quite overcome to hear that you are, indeed, alive. He had been at the house and saw that it had been burned to the ground.” Then he hesitated. “I am not your father, Lily. Yet I am here to protect you, to stand in for your father. This young man is not suitable for you.”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk and began his lecture while I wondered, Who is Lily’s sweetheart? Who could it be? And suddenly such sadness washed over me. I thought of her happy face, ready to start her life. It wasn’t fair that at her happiest moment the walls came crashing down.

  And what of this man, her fiancé? Panic and shame hit me with the force of a slap. Mr. Crandall had no doubt told him that Lily was alive. He had despaired, and then he had been handed his happiness, and now I would have to tell him that she was dead. He would lose her twice. I would have to deliver that unimaginable pain.

  I had stopped listening, but then I heard Mr. Crandall say this:

  “In short, Mr. Jewell is not a gentleman.”

  And my mind stopped short and turned around.

  Andrew Jewell? And Lily?

  And suddenly I remembered Lily on the train, always taking that walk while her mother napped, and that glimpse I saw of her, standing with a tall, slim man, their backs to me. . . .

  But he’d seen us on the street just a few days before. He’d heard Mr. Crandall call me Lily.

  Or perhaps I was mistaken. I must have been mistaken. Or else why was he here?

  My mind whirled. Could Andrew Jewell have loved Lily?

  “And I must urge you to dissolve the engagement.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

  It was almost comical, Mr. Crandall’s look of surprise. His mouth dropped open. It was clear he hadn’t expected his lecture to work quite so efficiently.

  “I’m happy to hear you’ve come to your senses,” Mr. Crandall said.

  “I will write to him,” I said.

  “That would be difficult, as he has no home, along with half of San Francisco,” Mr. Crandall pointed out. “In any event, he is waiting in the parlor.”

  I had to break off just now as there was a knock on the door. Mrs. Flynn has brought me a cup of tea. As she changed the dressings on my hands, she said gently that I could stay as long as I liked in her house.

  I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “You don’t know me,” I said.

  She turned over my hands very gently so that my red, blistered palms showed. “I know enough,” she said.

  Now I’ve wrapped a borrowed shawl around myself. My whole body is shaking as I contemplate what I am facing, what I have to do.

  But let me go back to when I walked into the parlor to see Andrew Jewell.

  It took every bit of courage I possessed to walk through that door. I didn’t know what I would find, an anxious fiancé overjoyed at seeing his beloved . . . and then crushed by the new information that she had perished. Or would I find someone who had guessed my deception?

  I wasn’t sure what would be worse.

  He was standing by the window when I slipped inside and closed the door after me. I didn’t say anything for a long moment as he turned. We stood facing each other and then, slowly, he smiled.

  “So, Jock Bonner’s daughter,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what scheme you’ve been working?”

  I hesitated, not knowing what to say or where to start.

  “Come, come now. Shyness doesn’t become you. What happened to Lily, first of all?”

  “I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Jewell, but your fiancée was killed instantly the morning of the quake. I realize now that she was on her way to see you.”

  “Yes. I had persuaded her on the train journey to run away together.”

  “You must be experiencing great grief right now.”

  “Terrible grief,” he said. “I am on my knees.”

  “Yes, I can see how much the news has affected you.”

  He didn’t miss the scorn in my voice. “Poor Lily,” he said. “Such an unhappy girl. So ready to have someone to depend on. I would have tried to make her happy. It was not to be.”

  “So you really meant to marry her?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “But Mr. Sump would have disinherited her.”

  “I had some reasons to convince him not to oppose his daughter’s choice.”

  “You mean you would have blackmailed him.”

  He smiled. “Such an ugly word for persuasion.”

  I sat down, shocked at the depths of this man’s cruelty. Poor Lily. He hadn’t loved her at all.

  “Now,” he said. “Tell me what happened, and how you have managed to fool Mr. Crandall.”

  I told him how Mr. Crandall had found me and at first just assumed I was Lily, and that I didn’t correct him. That I wanted him to agree to give the tavern back to my parents since Mr. Sump had cheated them out of it. He could make things right.

  He just laughed. “You little fool, Crandall is as crooked as Sump,” he said. “Now he gets to handle all the money. I can imagine how that thrills him. He wants to be Sump. Now he can be. He’ll never agree. Unless . . .”

  I watched the calculation in his face. He studied me closely for a moment. “So Lily is dead, and you are alive, and now you are an heiress to the Sump millions. You’re quite the gambler for a young lady.”

  I deserved that, but I didn’t like hearing it. “And you are a two-bit thief who would take advantage of a sweet, trusting girl like Lily,” I said.

  “Hardly two bits, petal. And Lily was . . . not so sweet. She wanted an escape, and I provided one. Is what I was going to do much worse than what you did, Miss Bonner?”

  “I had a reason.”

  “Oh, we all have reasons.”

  His smile made me feel cold. Fear coiled inside me. I realized that I had no idea how far this man would go to get back what had almost been in his grasp.

  “I’m going to tell Mr. Crandall the truth,” I said, starting toward the door. “This has gone far enough.”

  He grabbed my arm. “Oh, no, you aren’t, petal,” he said. “We’re in this together now.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not like you. I know of your association with Mr. Sump. I know he paid you and I know how much. I know that you were involved in the scheme to cheat my father out of our tavern.”

  “What a suspicious little mind you have. I’m impressed.”

  “I don’t have mere suspicions. I have proof!”

  There is where I made my error, diary. I spoke without thinking because I was so afraid and angry.

  He cocked his head and narrowed his gaze. “You have proof, you say? How? Where?”

  I didn’t answer, and he took my hand and squeezed it. The burns I had sustained from Friday screamed in protest, and I let out a gasp of pain. He merely asked me where again. And squeezed.

  “A ledger!” I gasped. I fell back on the sofa as he released me.

  “Of course that old miser had to write everything down. Well, that makes things more interesting, doesn’t it? Where is this ledger?”

  I told him I had buried it in a fireproof box.

  He paced around the room. Despite the pain in my hand, I felt a kind of numbness. I couldn’t think of what to do or how to stop this. It was as though a spool of thread had fallen from my lap and was now busily unraveling
itself as it rolled away across the floor.

  “This was a brilliant stroke, Miss Bonner! We have him now. The question is, how best to work the scheme. . . .”

  He told me his plan. We follow through on the engagement. We marry quickly. No one will find it odd — it’s what people do after disasters, seek a new life, he said.

  “Once you marry, you can control Sump’s money,” he said.

  “You mean you will control it,” I said.

  “We will seek an equitable disbursement,” he said. “Don’t worry, we will share in our good fortune. After a suitable period, I will run off. Poor Lily Sump, deserted by her no-good husband. You will go on with your life, with or without Sump’s money, that’s none of my concern. My guess is that you will get quite used to feeling comfortable in silks and satins, and will remain Lily Sump. Unless some long-lost relative shows up, that’s always a danger. But that’s your dilemma.”

  He told me not to be so shocked, that he had to make his way in the world just like any man, and did I think Mr. Sump was anything less than a crook himself?

  I told him there was a flaw in his plan. Mr. Crandall was my guardian and he would never agree to the marriage.

  “You let me handle him,” he said. “Remember, we have the ledger.”

  I didn’t like the way he said we, diary.

  In a match such as this, the one who is afraid, who shows that fear — loses. He could see how afraid I was. He knew he had me cornered.

  He told me I had no choice. It was either this, or jail. He would have no compunction, he assured me, turning me in to the police. He would play the grieving fiancé. Sympathy would be on his side — how terrible it was, he said mockingly, to walk the charred streets of San Francisco looking for his love, find out she was alive, and then have his hopes dashed! I would be thrown into a cell and no doubt Mr. Crandall would turn the key.

  “Do you know what they would do to you?” he said. “To someone who would take the identity of a poor dead girl?”

  “I can’t go to jail, I’m only fourteen,” I said.

  “Really? Such a prodigy! What impressive criminal skills you have at such a young age. Don’t worry, there are worse places than jail for criminal children.”