April 16, 1906
One day, sixteen hours, seven minutes before the earthquake
Gemma didn’t want to get all metaphorical about birds in cages, but her eyes welled up every morning when she came downstairs to release Toscanini into the glass-paned, green-scented, blossom-heavy jungle that was the octagon house conservatory. The way her budgie always flew a delirious lap around the glass walls, testing the limits of his new world and finding it so much bigger than the one he was used to—the way he perched himself on the highest branch of a potted orange tree and just sang and sang . . . “I know exactly how you feel,” she told him. Ever since coming to the octagon house she had been delirious, singing and singing and singing. Free as a bird.
“Mr. Serrano has arrived, Miss Garland,” the housekeeper said from the door of the conservatory. “Oh my, that bird . . . Is he allowed in here?”
“He’s too small to make a mess. I take him back to his cage in my room at night.” Toscanini was one of the few things Gemma had brought from her room on Taylor Street. She’d originally thought she might be going back there at night but . . . She smiled. No, she had not been leaving here at night. “Mr. Serrano is here, you said?”
“Waiting in the music room. As for the rest of the day,” the housekeeper rattled off, “you have fittings with the dressmaker at four, and dinner with Mr. Thornton at eight.”
“Excellent.” Gemma stretched up to scratch Toscanini’s fluffy chest with a gentle finger, then waltzed out of the conservatory. “Could you please send some ice water and hot tea up to the music room, Mrs. MacNeil? If it’s not too much trouble.” The house was humming like a huge well-oiled machine with preparations for the ball tomorrow: delivery carts coming and going from the servants’ entrance, enormous vases of flowers being carried upstairs, workmen arriving to prepare the ballroom floor . . . “Oh, and there’s another package of my things coming from Taylor Street,” Gemma called over her shoulder as she headed for the sweeping stairs. “Can you send it up to my rooms?”
“Of course, Miss Garland.” The housekeeper’s face gave no hint at all if she found it distasteful to take Gemma’s orders. Henry, of course, took that kind of thing for granted. He was used to being obeyed. Gemma still found it a novelty. But it was one she thought she could absolutely grow accustomed to.
Because as much as she loved la vie bohème and had even lived it—life in a rented garret, crammed together young and delirious with all your artistic friends—it was not actually possible to live for your art alone. You couldn’t live for art when you were consumed by the difficulty of everyday living, no matter how many garret-living poets like Rodolfo from La Bohème, subsisting on cigarettes and philosophy, said you could. How could you practice two hours a day when you had to work ten hours a day to get your bills paid? How could you focus on the purity of your German diction or the cleanness of your trills when worry drilled in the back of your mind about where dinner was coming from?
Here, all that worry had been sliced away from her in one stroke. If her best gown was torn, she could ring to have it mended or replaced. If she was hungry in the middle of practicing, she could call for a meal and then go back to work. If she woke in the middle of the night, it wasn’t out of worry that she’d never make it out of the opera chorus, it was because Henry had decided to wake her up by kissing along the line of her breasts under his crisp linen sheets.
“Hello, George,” Gemma said, beaming as she swept into the music room that had been made over entirely for her use. Pale buttercream yellow walls, shelves of opera scores, a vast concert grand with its great lid raised like the sail of a ship . . . And her accompanist, already seated and playing. She always knew George’s mood by what he was playing when she arrived for their rehearsal: today it was a melting bit of Chopin, which meant he was feeling introspective, but he looked up with a grin and went lilting off into some rollicking music hall tune.
“Lazybones,” he accused, looking her over. Her hair was still loose down her back, and she hadn’t dressed for the day, just come up in an ivory lace tea gown threaded with pale green ribbons. “Did you only just fall out of bed?”
“Anytime you see a soprano voluntarily awake before teatime, you should suspect demonic possession.” Gemma grinned, taking the tray from the maid at the door. Since she’d more or less moved to the octagon house a week ago, George had been hired to rehearse her daily—something Gemma had thought might be awkward, as he could hardly have any illusions as to her position here, but he hadn’t said a word about it. “I thought you were practicing with that string quartet this morning—”
“No, this evening. It’s slow going; Jesus, that cellist is a mule—”
“Is he still insisting on the Telemann? You hate Telemann—”
“—I’m trying to persuade them into some Granados, but you’d think I asked them to eat a beehive. Getting Western musicians to play anything from south of the equator . . .” George’s hands nimbled off into an Argentinian tango. “How are the migraines?”
“Mr. Thornton wants to take me to a doctor in Chinatown. He says they do something with needles that might help. I don’t like needles, but I’ll try anything.” Gemma poured herself a glass of ice water and George a cup of tea, doctoring it up with three sugars just the way he liked it. “Did you hear from your mother after her birthday? Is she still angling for you to go home to Buenos Aires?”
“Always. Someday I’ll do it.”
“Just not before my concert series,” Gemma begged, moving an enameled cigarette box off the windowsill to within his reach. “Here, I managed to get those cigarillos you like, even if they do smell like a dead matador—”
“Gracias, princesa.” He pushed back his rumpled sleeves and began warming her up, and soon they were diving into her program for the midnight ball.
The midnight ball, that was what Henry was calling it. Thousands would flock to see Caruso in Carmen, but only a select three hundred would flock in all their diamonds and velvets, the moment the Grand Opera House’s curtain came down, to the octagon house for the ball at midnight. The ball where Gemma would sing the second “Queen of the Night” aria and be launched, officially, as San Francisco’s new nightingale. It should not have been possible to pull off such a thing in a week, but money and willpower, Henry said, could pull off almost anything. Let me take care of the ball, he said, writing an almost offhand list of instructions for four hundred bottles of champagne, a full orchestra, massed camellias and lilies decorating the ballroom, three hundred engraved invitations dispatched in a single day. You just focus on the voice.
And she had—despite the luxury of the past week, Gemma could honestly say she’d never worked harder on her music, preparing for this performance. No easy program of old standards this time: she’d throw down her best.
Tomorrow night.
“Nervous?” George caught the little frisson that went through her voice as she ripped through the Queen’s final snarling notes.
“No. Yes?” Gemma sighed. The Metropolitan Opera traveling company had arrived this morning, two long trains pulling into San Francisco according to the servants’ gossip—nine sixty-foot baggage cars, followed by sleepers, diners, private cars, everything required to convey the great Caruso, an entire chorus, the orchestra and its instruments, the scenery and sets and costumes necessary to stage more than a dozen opera productions on the road. A traveling city that could perform any one of those operas with no more than a day’s rehearsal to adjust to a new stage space. Tonight the singers would be shaking off their travel dust at the Palace Hotel, but in the morning—“I wish I didn’t have to rehearse Carmen all tomorrow.” Normally she would have been looking forward to it; now her Metropolitan debut seemed an unnecessary distraction.
“Real life intruding on your daydream,” George remarked with a mocking little scamper of notes over the keyboard. “Inconsiderate of it.”
She made a face, but took his point. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. Sharing a stage with Caruso, chorus or not—it’s something to dream of. But with the ball right after, I can hardly think about it.”
“Twelve nights the Metropolitan company will be staying in San Francisco.” George’s hands wandered into something melancholy. Debussy, she thought. He was looking at the piano keys, though she knew he didn’t need to watch his hands to play. “Then they’re off to . . . Well, somewhere. A new city. Are you going with them?”
Gemma fiddled with the pale green ribbon on her sleeve. Henry was setting up the string of concerts she’d asked for; she’d seen the contracts. “We’ll see what happens after the ball.”
George took a slug of sweetened tea and began to play again, soft arpeggios singing out under his hands. Definitely Debussy. “Mr. Thornton never comes in to hear you practice.”
“He doesn’t want to distract me. He knows I’m working hard this time of day.” Which frankly Gemma found refreshing. So many seemed to assume that practice was something a singer did for a lark, rather than something essential to a professional—but Henry took it for granted that just as he kept business hours, so did Gemma. He would have been irked if she’d come sweeping into his study in the middle of the day expecting attention while he was hard at work reviewing land reports and shareholder figures; likewise, he wouldn’t have dreamed of interrupting her daily rehearsals. Their time together was at the end of the day, when work was done. “Besides,” she added, “he says my voice drifts through the whole house even from two floors away. He quite enjoys making business telephone calls to the sound of Delibes.”
“Gemma . . .” George’s big hands paused on the piano keys. “I don’t mean to meddle in your private affairs.”
“Yet somehow I think you’re going to do just that,” Gemma said, trying for a joke.
He didn’t smile. “All of this”—a gesture at the big rehearsal room, the piano, beyond it the suite of rooms given over to her use—“it’s dazzling. Generous. But I hope I don’t see you . . .”
Her eyebrows climbed.
“Hurt,” George finished.
Gemma wavered a moment between being annoyed and being touched. George Serrano hadn’t even known her for two weeks, and he felt qualified to comment on her private life? But in a way, yes, he was: few things were more intimate than making music together, and the two of them had been working closely for hours every day, for nearly all those two weeks since she’d arrived in San Francisco. She knew George’s mother was from Guatemala but his father from Argentina; she knew how he hummed under his breath when he played and that he had all of Beethoven’s piano concertos at his fingertips but preferred playing chamber music. In return, he knew her: how hard she’d fought for those first voice lessons in Red Hook; Toscanini and Nellie; her migraines and what was likely to set them off. Nonstop rehearsal was the fastest way in the world to make friends—and when you made friends, they felt entitled to comment on your private life, even if it annoyed you.
So Gemma sat down on the piano bench beside her accompanist. “Are you worried I’m in over my head?” She began playing a bit of Carmen, the death theme, deliberately gothic. Her chords clunked far more than George’s. “Not to worry, darling. I’m a realist. I know what to expect here.”
“And what’s that? Third finger down a note,” he couldn’t help adding, wincing at a sour chord.
She rearranged her fingers. “Men, in my experience, do not ever marry the opera singer. They enjoy her. And as long as I’m enjoying myself in turn, no illusions, what’s the harm?” Gemma knew she was not the first woman to be expensively installed at the octagon house—she’d overheard two of the maids remarking “At least this one doesn’t stay up till all hours like the previous one” when they tidied her room—and she doubted she would be the last, either. Not to mention the fact that at some point, an empire builder like Henry Thornton would decide it was time to found a dynasty, marry some little nineteen-year-old from a good family, and begin filling his octagon house with sons.
By that point Gemma might already be gone, hopefully touring the great opera houses of Europe, or perhaps they would still have something between them, which she would bring to a graceful end (and then tour the great opera houses of Europe). Henry would probably kiss her hand in farewell, send roses to her dressing room whenever he saw her perform, invite her periodically to intimate dinners, and shake his head ruefully when she refused (for the sake of that nineteen-year-old bride at home).
That was probably how it would all go, and Gemma didn’t mind a bit. “If you aren’t silly enough to fall in love,” she said now, “then no one can be hurt.”
George began adding some little tremolos below her basic chords, embellishing the Death theme. “Do you really think no man ever marries the opera singer?”
“Darling, I’m sure of it. And really, it’s quite all right. Because no man likes to share his wife, and anyone who married me would share me with this.” Patting her throat. “Not to mention the fact that I cannot cook.”
George smiled. “Not a bit?”
“Not a bit. I live on honeyed tea and oysters.”
“I live on steam beer and choripán.”
“What on earth is choripán?”
“Chorizo—that’s cured sausage, the best in the world—split open and slabbed together with chimichurri on fried bread. Casi tan delicioso como tu boca.”
“What did you just say?”
George took over the piano keys, shifting her deftly down the bench with a bump of his burly shoulder. “I said let’s get back to work.”
“That is not what you said,” Gemma accused, but got up with a laugh. “All right, let’s run ‘Der Hölle Rache’ again.”
“The long run of triplets, it could be cleaner. You’ve got the lung power, I know you do, but you sound like you’re running out of breath there for some reason.”
“Maybe with a better launch off the E . . .”
Another hour, and Gemma bid George goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, promised to see him tomorrow morning at the Grand Opera House (he would be back to his usual job, rehearsing the visiting opera chorus in the blocking rehearsal), and trailed to her octagonal pale pink dressing room where the best dressmaker in San Francisco waited to discuss the new wardrobe of imported Worth gowns being refitted for her immediate use. “Six evening gowns, six dinner gowns, six walking dresses, six traveling suits, six tea gowns to start, Miss Garland, and then we’ll see to the real wardrobe. What would you say to an empire gown of pale green liberty satin, with puffs of white tulle and silver embroidery?”
“It sounds divine.” Gemma didn’t think she’d ever be one of these society women who changed their frocks six times a day and wouldn’t dream of being seen in the same gown more than once, but it was heaven not to eye the fraying seams on her old biscuit faille and wonder if it would survive one more pressing.
When the dressmaker finally bustled away in a stream of assistants and tapes and pincushions, Gemma wandered into her bedroom—ice blue, with acanthus leaves picked out in white and gold wreathing the high ceiling; a massive bathroom next door with pale green walls like a mermaid’s grotto, and a huge tub in white Carrara marble. A dinner gown had already been laid out, silver gray velvet edged with chinchilla—Henry was taking her to the Palace Grill again; he swore they’d run into Caruso there. I have a little surprise for you and the maestro both, concerning Carmen . . . There would be champagne and foie gras, and Gemma looked forward to it, but for just a moment she wished she could order up some chorizo and chimichurri slabbed together on fried bread and eat it in her dressing gown with a mug of steam beer.
“Miss Garland?” A maid curtsied at the door. “That Chinese girl has brought your robe for the ball tomorrow. The embroidery repairs are completed, she says.”
“Send her in. I’d love to see it.” Gemma caught sight of a parcel sitting on an octagonal side table—the package of things she’d had sent over from her Taylor Street room. Rummaging through the bundle of clothes and trinkets, she pulled out the wrapped square packet that was Nellie’s last sketch. She frowned, tempted to toss it in the trash considering that careless, callous note that had accompanied it, but it really was a lovely thing, the Chinese boy and girl with the backdrop of Chinese symbols behind them. Sighing, Gemma propped the sketch up on her dressing table in front of the triple mirror.
“Your robe, ma’am.” The young Chinese girl named Susie slipped into the room, holding the embroidered silk reverentially across her arms. The same girl who had dropped her ring after the afternoon party, looking very different without rice powder and paint—Gemma had grown used to the sight of her in the octagon house this past week, generally whisking around a corner of the servants’ stairs, or slipping into a spare bedroom where she was ensconced with her embroidery needles and reels of silk thread over the blue dragon robe. Now she spread it carefully across the bed and then stepped back, eyes lowered.
“I can’t even tell where you mended it.” Gemma hardly dared touch the bands of raised gold-and-silver embroidery, the scrolled waves and mountains and clouds. She still wasn’t sure exactly how she was supposed to sing in something so heavy and grand, but Henry was insistent. “You do beautiful work.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” The girl’s eyes flicked up, her face never moving from its polite mask.
“I just got done being fitted into a dozen gowns made to the latest French fashions, and not one had embroidery as good as this. You could work in Paris— Susie?”
The girl’s face was already impassive, but now it had drained of color so she looked like a waxwork. No longer looking at Gemma, or the robe—her eyes were fixed over Gemma’s shoulder, on the dressing table.
“The sketch?” Gemma blinked, looking at Nellie’s drawing. “Why . . .” and her voice faded as she saw it.
The Chinese boy and girl, standing back to back, faces turned to look at the viewer. Not brother and sister, as Gemma had thought—a mirror image. The same face, oval with winged brows and sculpted chin, level eyes and grave mouth, only on the left that face was surrounded by a fedora and a boy’s knot-buttoned tunic, and on the right the hair fell loose and soft around an embroidered collar. The same face.
Susie’s face. Gemma didn’t think she’d have seen it if Susie hadn’t been standing there gazing at herself, those winged brows drawn together and her grave mouth a taut line. “It’s you,” Gemma heard herself say inanely. Susie the sewing girl, but also Susie wearing a fedora, dressed as a boy . . . Gemma remembered that fedora. “Y-You helped carry my trunk up to Taylor Street my first day in town,” Gemma stammered. “That was you, too.” Answering Gemma’s eager questions about San Francisco, taking a tip, smiling.
The Chinese girl jerked a tiny nod. She didn’t seem to be able to wrench her gaze from the sketch. She had a red silk cord around her neck, Gemma saw . . . And so did both of the painted depictions of her. “Excuse me, ma’am. Would you mind me asking where that drawing came from?”
“My friend Nellie sketched it. Did she hire you as a model when she was in San Francisco, or—”
Susie’s head whipped around, and Gemma nearly took a step back. No more ivory-faced servant or impassive seamstress—her eyes blazed.
“What are you talking about, Miss Garland? Reggie painted that.”