San Francisco while traveling with his parents in China when he was a young boy. He looked down into the pale face of Marion, who looked up at him, dazed and paralyzed by shock. He smiled grimly, trying to give her courage, as the shock waves tore the floor in the parlor from its beams and sent it collapsing into the lower apartment. He could only wonder if the occupants had been killed or were somehow managing to survive.
For nearly a full minute, they kept on their feet, clutching the doorframe, as their world turned into a nightmarish hell that went far beyond imagination.
Then slowly the tremors died away and an eerie silence settled over the ruin of the apartment. The cloud of dust from the fallen plaster ceiling filled their nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. Only then did Bell realize that they were still on their feet, clutching the doorframe, with Marion wearing a flimsy nightgown and him in a nightshirt. He saw that her radiant long hair had turned white from the plaster’s fine powder that still floated in the air like a mist.
Bell gazed across the bedroom. It looked like the contents of a wastebasket that had been dumped on the floor. He put his arm around Marion’s waist and pulled her toward the closet, where their clothes still hung on hangers, free of the dust.
“Dress and be quick about it,” he said firmly. “The building isn’t stable and might collapse at any minute.”
“What happened?” she asked in utter confusion. “Was it an explosion?”
“No, I believe it was an earthquake.”
She stared through the wreck of her parlor and saw the ruined buildings on the other side of the street. “Good Lord!” she gasped. “The wall is gone.” Then she discovered that her piano was missing. “Oh, no, my grandmother’s piano. Where did it go?”
“I think what’s left of it is down on the street,” replied Bell sympathetically. “No more talk. Hurry and throw on some clothes. We’ve got to get out of here.”
She ran to the closet, her composure back on keel, and Bell could see that she was as tough as the bricks that had fallen around them. While he put on the suit he’d worn the night before, she slipped into a cotton blouse under a coarse woolen jacket and skirt for warmth against the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. She was not only beautiful, Bell thought, she was also a practical, thinking woman.
“What about my jewelry, my family photos, my valuables?” she asked. “Shouldn’t I take them with me?”
“We’ll come back for them later, when we see if the building is still standing.”
They dressed in less than two minutes, and he led her around the gaping hole in the floor made by the fallen chimney and past the overturned furniture to the front door of the apartment. Marion felt as if she were in another world, as she stared out into open air where the wall once stood and saw her neighbors beginning to wander bewildered out into the middle of the street.
The door was wedged tight. The earthquake had shifted the building and jammed the door against its frame. Bell knew better than to attack the door by charging against it with his shoulder. That was a fool’s play. He balanced on one leg and lashed out with the other. The door failed to show the least sign of give. He looked around the room and surprised Marion with his strength when he picked up the heavy sofa and shoved it against the door like a battering ram. On the third thrust, the door splintered and swung crazily open on one hinge.
Thankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.
Marion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother’s piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.
“What was that about?” asked Marion.
“I offered to pay them five hundred dollars to take your mother’s piano to Cromwell’s warehouse by the railyard. When things get back to normal, I’ll see that it’s rebuilt.”
“Thank you, Isaac.” Marion stood on her toes as she kissed Bell on the cheek, stunned that a man could be so thoughtful about such a little thing in the midst of such disaster.
The army of people crowding the middle of the street was strangely subdued. There were no wails or cries, no hysteria. Everyone talked in whispers, glad they were alive, but not knowing what to do next or where to go or whether the earthquake would strike again. Many were still in their nightclothes. Mothers cuddled young children or clutched babies while men talked among themselves studying the damage to their homes.
A lull settled over the ruined city. The worst, everyone thought, had to be over. And yet the greatest tragedy was yet to come.
Bell and Marion walked to the intersection of Hyde and Lombard, seeing the cable car rails that now snaked like a meandering silver stream to the streets below Russian Hill. The cloud of dust hung tenaciously over the devastation, slowly dissipating as it was carried toward the east by the offshore breeze. From the docks protruding into the water around the Ferry Building west to Fillmore Street, and from the north bay far to the south, the once- great city was a vast sea of ruin and devastation.
Scores of hotels and lodging houses had collapsed, killing hundreds who had been sleeping soundly when the quake struck. The screams and cries of those trapped under the rubble and the badly injured carried up to the hill.
Hundreds of electrical poles had toppled, their high-tension wires snapping apart, whipping back and forth like desert sidewinders, sparks shooting from the tattered ends. At the same time, pipes carrying the city’s gas had split apart and now unleashed their deadly fumes. Tanks in the basements of manufacturing plants holding kerosene and fuel oil ran toward the fiery arcs thrown from the electrical wires where they met and burst in an explosion of orange flame. In destroyed houses, coals from the fallen chimneys ignited furniture and wooden frameworks.
Soon the wind helped merge the big and small fires into one massive holocaust. Within minutes, the city was blanketed by smoke from fires erupting across San Francisco that would take three days and hundreds of lives before they were contained. Many of the injured and trapped who could not be rescued in time would go unidentified, their bodies incinerated and turned to ashes by the intense heat.
