September 1906
Tahoe region, California
Alice Eastwood had lost her taste for towns. Paved streets could crumple like paper; massive buildings could sway like reeds; all could come tumbling down as soon as the earth shrugged its shoulders. You silly woman, she scolded herself, earthquakes happen in mountains and forests, too! But she couldn’t shake the unease that now filled her when she was surrounded by buildings, lampposts, walls. Arriving here in the Tahoe region, she’d drawn what felt like the first deep breath she’d pulled into her lungs since breathing out the last of San Francisco’s smoke.
I’ve been invited as a guest to the summer camp recently opened by some old friends at Fallen Leaf Lake, she wrote to Reggie and Suling and Gemma, and I am enjoying the mountain air. She was hiking herself into near collapse every day, but she didn’t mention that part. Her San Francisco friends had their own worries—Gemma in New York, singing in the Met chorus, supplementing with church singing where she could; Reggie and Suling in Oakland, struggling to settle the terrified, displaced cluster of Madam Ning’s girls. Alice sent them pressed clips of gentian and pond lilies gathered on her treks, but she didn’t write about the rest of it: setting off alone for Desolation Valley and not returning until shadows crawled tar-black over the snowbanks lingering on the higher slopes, gathering spiky red tendrils of snow plants with fingers gone numb and blue-dappled with cold, sitting on a boulder by Glen Alpine and trying to find a reason (any reason) to get up again. Up at five every morning, dawn just blushing the mountain air, to slip a robe over her bloomers and walk down to the lake where she’d plunge into the icy water and float there under the surface until her lungs nearly burst. The only place where, when she closed her eyes, she didn’t see her office at the Academy and her life’s work going up in flames.
I am quite carefree here was how Alice put it when she wrote to the others, with no desire to return to San Francisco. The second part at least was true.
It was a good fortnight since she’d last bothered going into town to collect her mail, so after her morning swim on the first day of September Alice coiled up her wet hair over the collar of her coat and made the trek in. Heading up the steps of the post office, she was nearly bowled over by a pair of boys chasing each other—“Stop that,” yelled their sister from the nearest bench, glancing up from her book with an exasperated look.
“What are you reading?” Alice asked the girl, who looked about twelve.
“Not reading. Studying.” The girl sighed. “They’re supposed to be studying, too, while we wait for Mama”—she glared at the roughhousing boys—“but they won’t.”
“Don’t let them copy your work later,” Alice advised. “If they don’t study, they don’t deserve an easy way out. What’s that, algebra? I used to like algebra when I was your age.”
“Were you good at it, ma’am?”
“No. But I worked harder than anyone else at it. Several of the boys in my class claimed they’d beat me, and they were all better at it than I was, but I still pitched myself against them.” Alice smiled at the memory. Smiling felt rusty. “It was a proud moment, succeeding where they’d failed.”
“Mama says pride is a sin.”
“Why? If you put in the work, don’t you deserve to feel proud?”
The girl frowned, tugging at the ribbon on the end of her plait. “Mama says I shouldn’t try to be too good at algebra. Nobody likes a bluestocking.”
Alice wanted to smack her mama. Why did it have to be so hard for talented girls, trying to succeed at anything? Why? Young Alice Eastwood teaching school to make ends meet, trying to be accepted on botanical gathering expeditions, forcing that laugh when she was nearly swept over a waterfall in Colorado because if she’d shed a single tear they would have all said That’s what you get for taking a woman along. Young Suling, now working for a seamstress in Oakland to pay rent for her and Reggie, those talented fingers wasted on cheap calico as she was paid half what a white seamstress would get. Golden-voiced Gemma, glassy-eyed from migraines, singing in a church choir to make ends meet. It wasn’t enough for a woman to be talented, clever, or good. That wouldn’t save her.
Alice nodded gruffly to the girl with the algebra book and went inside for her post. A whole bundle of letters; she sat down right there on the post office bench to read. Letters from Academy friends like Seth and Emily . . . An invitation to lead a botanical expedition to Yosemite for a group of eastern college girls looking for an adventure . . . A note from Suling; she had burned funeral offerings for Madam Ning at a temple in the Oakland Chinatown, burned more offerings for her uncle and cousins. She and Reggie were talking about heading east to look for better work. Reggie had enclosed a sketch of one of Madam Ning’s girls, newly married to an Oakland shopkeeper . . .
That wasn’t the only wedding, either—the letter with the New York postmark made Alice smile. Darling Alice, you will now have to address your letters to Gemma Serrano! It was a very small wedding, but you will be pleased to know I pinned a dried Queen of the Night flower in my hair—my cutting has yet to bloom, but I pressed one of the flowers that opened in San Francisco between the pages of the “Flower Duet” in my Lakmé score . . .
But the glow of Gemma’s cheery letter disappeared when Alice opened the next envelope.
Many apologies for not writing sooner, Sergeant Clarkson scrawled in his downhill slant. Even his handwriting looked exhausted, Alice thought—San Francisco had burned for a full three days after the first earthquake tremors, and any policeman worth his badge had been worn to a nub these past few months dealing with the displaced, the wounded, the dead, the destruction. But I have news now, Clarkson went on. As of this week, Mr. Henry Thornton is presumed dead. No body has been found, but many disappeared in the fires, and since he has not reappeared or otherwise contacted the authorities, his name has finally been added to the list of the deceased. The man’s affairs are being settled by his lawyers with the intention of dispersing his assets to whatever family he may possess back East . . .
Alice jammed the letter back into its envelope, lips suddenly dry. Thornton. She straightened her hat, bundling the packet of mail into her bag and making her way out of the post office. The girl with the workbook was still there on the bench outside, her brothers still ignoring her—Alice found herself pausing, looking down at the small figure poring over her algebra equations. “Don’t just be good,” she found herself saying slowly. “At your schoolwork or anything else. Be the best.”
The girl looked up, blinking. “Why, ma’am?”
“Because life, despite what the Psalms tell us, is not about who is good.” Alice pulled her coat closer around her neck, feeling cold. “It is about survival. The ones who survive are not necessarily good.”
And Alice Eastwood didn’t believe for one moment that Henry Thornton had not survived the San Francisco inferno.