“Hey?” I said gently. “How about we put the kitchen to rights, then when Rose comes, she’ll be glad we’re here.”
Pie nodded. “I can start on the larder,” she said. “If I get wibbly, I’ll drag in a chair.”
I found more of Tan’s aprons in a drawer and tied one around her. Her waist was so tiny, I had to double-wrap the string. She tied an apron around me.
“You’ve got a nice waist,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“Do I?” I had no idea.
So much I didn’t know.
For instance, how many months it would take for the most basic parts of city life to resume—water flowing from the tap, the cable cars humming, a school day with the dread nuns. There’d be no gas or electricity or telephone service for weeks; no water, except the meager cupfuls doled out in the relief lines. It had taken less than a minute for the citizenry of San Francisco to be reduced to the hunter-gatherers of old. Cooking over fires, sleeping in coats, relieving themselves over buckets or in trenches. Society, with its rules and strictures, would have to be rebuilt brick by brick.
Standing in Tan’s kitchen, I understood that neither sweetness nor tears would take care of Pie and me. Dust in our mouths; ash in our teeth. We were squatters in Rose’s house, that’s what we were. And in that, we were lucky.
“Pie, will you be all right? I’m going to check upstairs.”
I wanted to go alone—to where I’d never been invited and was not now.
I climbed tentatively, like an archaeologist, like a novice thief, mindful that at any moment a tiger! a harlot! or Rose herself—might leap out to snatch me.
The first door on the second floor led to an enormous pink bathroom—with a pink marble tub and gold faucets and a gold wand for rinsing your hair. Not one but two marble sinks with fixtures cast as shapely swans, a vanity with a fur-covered stool. Mirrors, also gold leaf, covered three of the four walls; they showed my mouth agape, my face streaked and dirty. All the mirrors had cracked, same as the marble floor—same as the San Andreas Fault.
Pie found me staring at the gizmo next to the toilet.
“It was too scary to be down there alone,” she explained. “What’s this? What’s it for?”
The ceramic bowl looked similar to the flush toilet beside it, only it had no seat, and hot and cold spigots. Our virgin minds strained to imagine what it could be used for, here in the madam’s bathroom.
“For washing her bloomers?” Pie suggested.
I pointed to the pair of sinks and shrugged. Then I tried turning the knobs of the twin taps. The pipes inside the walls groaned and shuddered; a single blast of water—all that was left in the house—shot upward in a jet, then flowed down the drain.
“It’s for swishing your privates,” I declared.
“Why ever would you—” Pie bit her lip before saying anything more.
Pie wasn’t well. The dust in her chest made it impossible for her to catch her breath. I made her lie down in the room next to Rose’s, in a bed with a velvet headboard and matching coverlet, of a richness we’d never seen. Pie curled in a ball like a princess waif. And there I left her, promising I’d fetch her if there was even the smallest tremor.
Next I went to check Rose’s room. Naturally, she wasn’t there. Was I disappointed? Of course.
Her room was twice the size of the other bedrooms; it faced the rear of the house and the garden, with a view of Nob Hill. A fine plaster dust layered everything. Quake dust. One long wall was devoted to a series of mirrored closets and drawers; in the quake, they’d flung themselves open, spilling her gowns and silk garters, stockings and corsets. Opposite the bed, a Victrola had miraculously clung to its gilded stand.
If she were dead, I wasn’t prepared to linger; if she were alive, I wouldn’t have wanted her to find me there. I shut the door.
But I kept on searching the house, every room and closet. Feeling like an impostor but acting like a huntress, I climbed the stairs to the next floor of bedrooms, and above that to the attic, where her two maids slept, their rooms turned over in haste, clothes strewn about and the beds unmade; I imagined they’d run back to their families after the first round of quakes.
A third room faced the street. It was slightly larger, with a cot against one wall and, on the opposite wall, a sewing machine fitted in a dark-hulled cabinet. It had a rag rug, a rocking chair. Light poured in through an ox-eye window—some three feet wide—that was the central feature dominating the top of the house.
The window hinged at the center; when I unhooked the lock, it pivoted on an axis. I opened and closed the window several times, marveling at how it was made. The room faced due west, toward the ocean and the sunsets and, closer, Lafayette Square. I imagined on an evening the maids would sit here, reading or mending. Here, you could rock at your leisure and watch the doings in the square, or you could wish yourself all the way to the ocean or, beyond the ocean, clear to Japan.
While I fussed with the window, Rogue made himself at home. He jumped on the cot and settled, his head nestled between his paws.
“V!” Pie called up the stairs. “What are you doing up there? Quick, come down.”
I hurried. “Hell, you scared me. What is it?”
She pulled me to a window in the bedroom where she’d been resting.
Tan was standing on the far side of the road, on the grassy banks of the square. All manner of chaos and hurt was passing by him—refugees pulling carts, soldiers blasting whistles urging folks to help or move along. Tan struck an oblivious
