chapter eight

As an only daughter, I learned from my frugal father how to make simple repairs around the house. I can now afford to hire others to do this type of work, but I can’t bear the thought of disappointing my father.

What this means is that I spent my two weeks of vacation painting the outside of my house. I’d been waiting for the painting fairies to take care of the project while I slept. When they didn’t show by the second day, I tackled the project on my own.

The downside is coming back to the pressures of a project at the university that is behind schedule before it even starts. While most seasoned researchers would begin at the university library, I start this morning at home with my father’s roll-top desk. The shelves within the desk and the wall behind it are covered with books about the bridge. Since my father’s death, I haven’t spent much time in his den. The desk recalls lonely memories, like barbed-wire barriers keeping me at bay. Oh, I come in and dust and vacuum and clean the windows. I’ve even sorted through the drawers and straightened the stacks of papers. What I haven’t done is clean out its contents.

The desk is old. It was old the day my father acquired it at an estate sale up in the Mission District. But the lock and drawers still work perfectly. Today, my skin chills as I twist the key to release the catch. As the desk swallows its rickety cover, I wonder, like Pandora, if demons wait inside to be released.

But once it is opened and exposed, I am reminded that not all of the memories sheltered inside cause me grief. On the right inside panel, there is a picture I painted in the third grade of a house with a chimney and a white picket fence. I pull it toward me for a closer look.

There are smiling faces in three of the windows and a dog named Oscar in the fourth. There are cows and pigs and a pasture blended with bushes and trees and small scribbles of yellow flowers in the yard. Next to the house, tall golden and orange spires of a bridge spring forth from the ground. The cable from the bridge connects to the house, becomes a part of it—as if the Golden Gate Bridge is connected to every home.

It is a curious picture because there is no water, no deep rugged canyon, no ocean for the orange bridge to span. There is just a house, a family, a pasture with animals, and a bridge.

I remember when I presented the picture to my father. He seemed pleased, but then asked, “Katie, where’s the ocean?” He meant no harm, but when he asked, I realized for the first time that I’d drawn the picture wrong. I could feel my face flush, which he must have noticed, for he pulled me close and declared it to be the best picture of the bridge he’d ever seen. We left the house and walked together to the drugstore where he purchased a frame. At home, he waited until I was watching and then hung the picture next to the spot where he liked to sit and read. It stayed near him always from then on, and to a little girl it represented a part of me that had blended with him. And though I had no memories of my mother or the cancer that took her by my second birthday, it helped me to know that I was still part of a family. Now, many years later, I’m amazed that the desire to belong, felt by a little girl so very long ago, bubbles to the surface with such ease.

I know that I must begin my research, so I replace my childhood picture of the bridge and remove several volumes about the Golden Gate from the shelf—some are picture books, others are histories. As I flip their pages, I wonder what I can contribute that hasn’t already been said or drawn or written. Can an obscure university researcher make a difference to anyone?

I work most of the day and late into the evening. After I’ve made pages of notes, my eyes begin to burn. It’s past midnight, and since I have to be at work early, I return the volumes to their shelves. It is when I look for the key, which I’d dropped into the main desk drawer, that I notice the corner of a book. Only an inch or so of its spine shows from beneath stacks of old bills. I pull it out and study the cover, but there is no title. It’s bound in leather, though it’s flaking off in small pieces from the spine to reveal a decaying, powdery fabric beneath.

As I open the book, several pages of an old telephone directory that had been placed loose within the cover fall to the desk. I ignore them and turn to the book’s inside cover where I see the handwritten name of Patrick O’Riley. It is dated 1931. Below the date is an address in Parkside, a few miles from where I live. As I turn the pages, I see notes and hand-drawn pictures. The penmanship is hard to read, but the pages include detailed drawings and cross sections of the Golden Gate, like it could be a forgotten engineering journal of the bridge.

I search the desk and the shelves to see if I have missed other volumes, but all I see besides old bills are more directory pages. Many of the names are crossed off, and I recognize my father’s handwriting in the margins.

“Not home, try later.”

“Busy.”

“Call back.”

When I inspect the names closely, I see that every person he called, every name crossed out, every line with a notation by its side, is someone named O’Riley.

My eyes sting, but my heart races. I’m not sure, but I sense that I have just discovered something significant—either for the university or for myself.

I know I should go to bed, but instead I randomly turn the pages. What I see next causes my adrenaline to surge. There is a drawing of a cable, in particular a cross section of the thirty-six-inch cables that drape the towers. The picture is penned in ink and with intricate detail shows how the three-foot-diameter cables were wound of smaller strands, more than twenty-seven thousand in all. The drawings detail how the wire was pulled into one thick cable and then wrapped and banded to hold it intact. There are engineering calculations that note the strength of the cable, how it increases with each added strand. Below the pictures are words I’ve heard my father repeat often—my father’s words, but written in the curious penmanship of a stranger.

“Together, we do the impossible. Like the cable that drapes from her towers, Strauss is joining men together to accomplish greatness. Indeed, we build an impossible bridge.”

The words ring in my ears. “Together, we do the impossible.” I can hear my father’s voice as if he were speaking. I take deep breaths and reflect.

It had been difficult for my father to raise his daughter while holding down a full-time job on the bridge. Like most children and parents, we had our moments—times when each questioned if we’d make it. During those times, my father would often pause, take a similar deep breath, and say, “Sure it’s hard, but, honey—together, we do the impossible.” He would say it with conviction, as if he believed the words. And because he believed them, I believed them.

One time in particular, he even used an actual piece of cable from the bridge. I must have been eleven or twelve, already teenage-stubborn and making him crazy. After dinner he set the cable section on the table before me. It was tiny compared to other cables I’d seen on the bridge, but similar in design. It was about two inches in circumference, six inches long, and made up of many smaller strands twisted together in spiral fashion. When he removed the masking tape that held it together, the twisted pieces fell into a pile of corkscrew pick-up sticks. He told me it was a game, and that I needed to fit the curled pieces back together into a single cable. I tried on my own for a few minutes without much success, and then together we pieced them into one and secured the tape. He explained that the huge cable draping the bridge was no different. It was simply a bunch of smaller cables wound together to make one giant cable, capable of holding up tons of concrete, miles of steel, and hundreds of cars.

He said that people are the same as the cable. We can’t make it by ourselves because we aren’t strong enough, but if we unite with others, there will be enough common strength. He took my hand and said, “Katie, let’s work together, let’s get through this. We’ll be like the cable pulling together—doing what we aren’t strong enough to do on our own. Believe me, honey . . . together, we can do the impossible.”