I leaped to my feet.
“V, sit down,” cried Pie.
But Bobby, he got it immediately. Reaching over the seat, he grabbed my hips with both hands and held me so I wouldn’t topple. I could feel the warmth of his hands, they were beautiful hands, and I thought: Bobby, don’t let me fall.
The car passed by.
I looked behind me, into the back seat. Bobby shrugged and tipped his head, as if to say, And if so, Anyway, what would change?
It might have been, it must have been Rose.
There are only two people I’ve ever truly wanted, and both I shall never have. Mine was a slow education of the heart.
The Buddhists say there is no such thing as good and bad, it’s all life. Well, I never trucked much with the Buddhists; they’re entirely too calm. And I never met one who didn’t hold back on spice in their cooking, if you know what I mean. That said, it is all life. And anyone who claims to be good has yet to shake hands with her dark side. Across a hundred years I’ve met most of my parts, and I’ve lived a good deal in the shadows. I’ve reconciled the anger with the hope, the bitter with the bullshit, the yearning with the grief, the fake with the true. I have an unkempt soul. I am extraordinarily ordinary. But I have known love—great love. Oh, yes, I’ve known it. And that I will take with me into the night. I like best the parts of us that are contradictory and most human.
Those are the places I visit now. When the nurse brings me my meds and food I won’t eat; when my family, what’s left of it, comes to see the old bag and brings me chocolate and news, I grin and close my eyes. I return to that year when the world ended and I was most alive.
I apologize for nothing.
Maybe I should have been sent to the Ingleside Jail for Women, same as Abe Ruef was kicked up to San Quentin, but I wasn’t. And if Mayor Schmitz spent any time wondering who stole the cash from his boodle box, I don’t imagine he lingered. No, Schmitz was spared and so was I. I’ll live out my fate as I began: a single girl in this temblor-riven paradise, this city of prostitutes and thieves and dreamers and me.
There’s talk these days of another quake coming, nature’s apocalypse. Well, I’ve seen the apocalypse. I’ve seen the end of the world and I tell you: I’ve seen marvelous things.
Acknowledgments
I never know where curiosity will lead me. Some thirty years ago, I began collecting books, maps, and articles related to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. I kept the best of the lot on a shelf (interestingly, above politics and below medical tomes) and let them talk to one another—and to me.
Across the years of researching and writing Vera, I used dozens of source books and websites too numerous to mention here. Still, thanks are due to a few works that informed and inspired my thinking: Dan Kurzman’s Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906; Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World; Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906; San Francisco Stories by Jack London; Lost San Francisco by Dennis Evanosky and Eric J. Kos; Big Alma: San Francisco’s Alma Spreckels by Bernice Scharlach; The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 by Ruth Rosen; Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 by Gladys Hansen and Emmet Condon; and Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Thank you Susie Magnin Grenitz for loaning me your only copy of Call Me Cyril, by Cyril Magnin and Cynthia Robins.
My gratitude to the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and my most ardent thanks to its founder, Charles Fracchia, who took a call from a complete stranger, invited her to tea, then offered to review her manuscript. I cannot thank him enough for his kindness and eagle-eye.
The Museum of the City of San Francisco’s photography collection and digital archives were invaluable guides, particularly the timelines of the quake and fire and the remarkable eyewitness accounts. I’m grateful for the bounteous archives of FoundSF, the Examiner, the Call, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times. The collections of historical photographs at the San Francisco Public Library and at the National Archives and Records Administration proved tremendous, as did Wikipedia, for all manner of historical fodder from clothing to curses.
Several films helped me understand the spirit of the city before and after, particularly Harry Miles’s thirteen-minute film A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, shot just four days before the 1906 quake. Miles attached a movie camera to the front of a cable car as it made its way down Market Street, thus capturing the happy mayhem of motors and horse and buggies as they crisscrossed the busy Slot. (Mercifully, the film was shipped off to New York for processing or otherwise it would have been lost.) Two necessary companions to the Miles footage were After A Trip Down Market Street 1906, which captured the devastation following the quake and fire, and The Damnedest, Finest Ruins, narrated by Peter Coyote.
Where I have strayed from fact into fiction, I’ve done so in service to story—to the follies, desires, and wayward paths of Vera and her compatriots. Any lapses in place, timing, or persons are mine.
I’m grateful to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh for early Vera championing and to Dorian Karchmar for seeing Vera home. Thanks to the rest of the crackerjack team at WME: Jill Gillett, Caitlin Mahony, Fiona Baird, Alex Kane, and Erica Nori.
Much thanks to everyone at Scribner, especially Kara Watson, Nan
