We crossed the road and looked back at what was left of our city. Where there had been block after block of fancy houses and apartment buildings, there were only smoldering ruins leading up to Nob Hill. At the very top, the nearly finished Fairmont Hotel, an edifice of white, had smoke piping out of its windows.
Pie shaded her eyes with her hand. “Do you think… Will it ever be good again?”
I didn’t know. It seemed unlikely in every respect.
Pie wiped her eyes with her sleeve and the white of the cotton showed black from the ash. Pie frowned at her sleeve and said, “James once told me that San Francisco was built with miner’s luck, but the rocks that made the gold want revenge—that’s why the city’s burned so many times.”
I thought that might be the most interesting thing ever ascribed to James O’Neill. I didn’t agree with it; luck was what you made of it, no more, no less, and the city had plenty of good luck, and plenty of bad luck too. It wasn’t in the rocks and it wasn’t in the air.
“For a person our age, James is awfully certain,” I said.
“In his way, I suppose he is,” Pie agreed. “He doesn’t like Eugenie’s father, that’s for sure. James says that Mayor Schmitz will get what he deserves.” Pie coughed again, and again we stopped to wait for the spell to pass.
“Sometimes,” Pie said, her voice low and hoarse, “I want to disagree. And I do, gently. James is awfully tough on brothels.” Pie smiled slyly. “He says in San Francisco there will always be more hookers than police, ’cause that’s who started the city—miners and hookers. Well, you know, I have to bite my tongue. If only James knew.”
“When do you plan on telling him?”
“About us and Rose?” Pie tucked her lips and gave a defiant shake of her head. “Never. Morie always said: Rose is a secret we take to the grave.”
It struck me as rude to say the obvious: that Morie did take that secret to the grave. “What about now, Pie? I mean, here we are.”
She paused, the way she did when batting away dark thoughts to welcome a more convenient notion.
“Oh,” she said, “after James and I marry, I wouldn’t expect ever to see Rose again. There’ll be no need. Not for me, at least.”
“You mean, you’d move on and I’d be left.”
“Well, you’d be… Well, I don’t know exactly what you’d be, but we just thought—”
She watched me step back, the empty tin pails I was carrying—one for milk, one for water—banging together like hollow drums.
So, it had all been arranged, talked over, on how many nights of whispering after I disappeared to my room? How many nights had Morie and Pie planned their new lives—their lives without me? At my birthday, Rose said that folks can always be counted on to put their desires first, and wasn’t that so true.
“Oh, V, dearest, I don’t mean you and me. We’ll always be us,” Pie protested, her voice as tinny and empty as our pails. She sidled next to me, to prove we were and always would be sisters, knit boots to hip bones to shoulders to the rims of our hats together.
“Forget it, Pie,” I said, and walked on.
“V, honestly—” she called.
“Honestly.”
Her cough worsened as she tried to keep up. I didn’t bother to slow my pace. At the far corner of the square, a man had rolled his Steinway piano out the double doors of his ruined house and onto the wood planks that made up the sidewalk. He had put up a sign to let folks know that he was selling the piano for fifty dollars. To show its worth, or perhaps to mourn its loss, he was playing Schumann.
“ ‘About Strange Lands and People,’ ” Pie said as she came up next to me.
“I know the song, Pie,” I declared sullenly.
In our little house on Francisco Street, Pie played it precisely, without feeling. Morie acted the part of a metronome, clapping her hands till Schumann resembled the march of the Vikings.
Played right, it was hauntingly sad.
“I seem to be ruining everything,” Pie lamented. “Please, V, forgive me.”
“Shh,” I said. “I want to listen.”
“Thing is,” she went on, “I don’t feel him anymore. James, I mean. I don’t feel him.” To press the point, Pie squeezed my hand. “Do you think it’s a sign?”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking that it was time I stopped being shocked by my cold Swedes.
“V?”
“Shh.”
“Fifty dollars isn’t very much for a piano, is it?”
We decided to find Lifang in the relief lines, then look for Ricky. But as we neared the far end of the square, from a distance, we could see that Lifang was in trouble.
She was supposed to be holding our place in the milk line, alongside hundreds of refugees. The queues for the water, soup, and bread stations were equally long, a loop that went around the square and doubled back. Rich and poor, servant and Pacific Heights matron, had to stand for hours in the stiff wind and floating ash, with nothing to do but gossip. That, and read the list of dead in the Call posted on boards throughout the square.
The white matrons of the neighborhood, and several of the newcomer refugees, many of whom could only dream of a foothold in Pacific Heights before the quake, had cut the line in front of Lifang.
First they’d elbowed her out of the way, then they insulted her with their dirty looks. Lifang cursed them in Cantonese, and when they turned their backs to her, she spat at their feet.
Just as we arrived, a woman jabbed Lifang with the sharp end of her parasol. Lifang had her own stick and she was pointing it at the woman like a sword.
“Stop! Stop this,” Pie cried. The women ignored her.
I took Lifang’s stick and moved her back, so she was behind me.
“We were just about
