THE UNOFFICIAL STORY
TELEGRAPH HILL
MAY 30, 1906. 8:00 A.M.
It was a month ago that I finally managed to convince myself I was still alive. That day—a week after the inferno burned out—the fire clap had faded from my ears enough that I was able to hear a knock on the door of our singed Victorian.
I arose from a seated position on the floor where I had been typewriting day and night on the Remington, and shuffled through inch-deep ash, little clouds erupting with every step. I jerked open the brittle front door to discover an overdressed man waiting on the puffy stoop.
He asked for Annalisa Passarelli, opera and theater critic for the Evening Bulletin, cringing at the sight of me. When I said I was she, he lowered the handkerchief he had been clutching to his nose to ward off the acrid smell of burnt everything and introduced himself as Mr. Charles Appleby. He stated he had been sent by the California State Historian at Sacramento, removed his bowler hat as if preparing for a benediction, and began to recite a litany of statistics.
Three hundred miles of California coastline reconfigured. Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, San Jose, and several dozen other small towns reduced to rubble from Humboldt County to Monterey. Nearly a half million people sent running for their lives, more than thirty thousand buildings incinerated including thirty-seven national banks, the Pacific Stock Exchange, two opera houses; hundreds of millions of dollars in smoke and ash.
I interrupted to explain that I was aware of the physical losses, having witnessed much of it with my own eyes.
He then mentioned an honorarium that sounded like one thousand dollars, offering me a position as one of six writers chosen by the State Historian's office to report the events of April 18, 1906, and the three terrible days that followed. After aiming one blistered ear, then the other, straining for detail, I had my cracked lips parted and my swollen tongue dislodged and was about to accept when he mentioned the phrase "Official Story." He looked up, braving the sight of me as chivalrously as his horror permitted, stating that all of the required fodder for the effort would be provided by the office of our Mayor, the ever-grinning marionette Eugene Schmitz.
The six writers would be encouraged to add "little dashes of color" and "some inspiring bits of human interest" that would then be reviewed by the Official Information and Oversight Committee. For some reason that portion of Mr. Appleby's tale came through quite clearly.
The undulating crimson veil that had colored my field of vision had also subsided, enough so that I was able to examine the written proffer. After further Appleby emphasis of just how keen everyone was to perpetrate the official fraud—his voice filtered through the metal-on-metal shriek that had replaced the fire's throb—I returned his document and gave a shake of my frazzled head, sending a faint halo of ash floating down on him.
He returned to his carriage with the half-skipping gait usually seen on tourists who inadvertently wander—or once wandered—into the Barbary Coast after dark. The dappled mare tethered to the black runabout was as anxious to leave as queasy Mr. Appleby.
Had I accepted, I would have been, at twenty-two, the youngest of the deceitful six and the only woman. Add that I was the opera and theater critic for Mr. Fremont Older's Evening Bulletin, a crusading journal which appeared, at present, to have soundly lost the crusade, and I was easily the group's most unlikely candidate. A thousand dollars was an attractive sum in a city living in Army tents, standing in soup lines or spearing rodents for sustenance, but I was content with my decision as I was not prepared to enter the whoring profession just yet.
I had my own version of the story, much of it collected and composed before the horror struck; a version that would do nicely without assistance from City Hall.
But I have gotten ahead of myself, a dangerous state of affairs for a writer.
You see - the city of San Francisco is no more. The Paris of the Pacific, the wealthiest and wickedest of American cities, is now ash and memories. All that remains are blackened wharfs, the iron puddle of a church bell, a mound of cinders where a school once stood, hilly graveyards of charred bricks and melted iron skeletons, an endless scorch mark that was once the grandest boulevard in the West. A city of four hundred and fifty thousand frenetic souls; shaken from its moorings, burnt to a crisp, vanished from the face of the earth.
The fire stopped a block below us, here at the crown of Telegraph Hill, sparing seven houses where once were thousands, seven sullied teeth in the mouth of a black-gummed giant. Seven houses where once sat a raucous Barbary Coast, a majestic Market Street, a teeming Chinatown, seven houses for all of North Beach and Russian Hill and Cow Hollow and the Embarcadero.
I write my story, still floating in a sea of ash. Ash that was once the city of San Francisco: once someone's mansion, someone's opera house, someone's tenement, someone's bakery. Someone's someone. My cough sends a fluffy tail snaking across the feathery surface of something that was once precious to someone.
I cringe at the further horror wrought by the lies that Mayor Schmitz and his minions attempt to foist upon us. Let me tell you what really happened here, before deception triumphs and the truth is lost forever. Let me paint for you the Imperial City of San Francisco: part Paris, part Dodge City; literate and boorish, libertine and feudal, a soiled Mecca, a beacon for those who had grown weary of the broken promises. San Francisco had invigorated the dream and become the new America.
I offer my own version of this extraordinary tale, one that began well before the holocaust. It is a personal observation; part history and part memoir, an attempt to add a human face to a most inhumane series of events.
I complete my version of the story, cross-legged in a barren Victorian on roasted Telegraph Hill while the unholy trinity of Mayor Eugene Schmitz and Boss Adam Rolf and Napoleonic General Frederick Funston are meeting at a bakery on Fillmore Street in the Western Addition, just past the fire line, to concoct their account. Their objectives are quite simple: to protect themselves from the hangman's noose, minimize the totality of the horror lest the sane world recoil from our restoration, and defraud history by convincing us this was all God's will and not their folly.
The newspapers, printed daily in Oakland, barrage us with tales of their heroics: of the steely resolve of Mayor Schmitz and the unflinching courage of Funston's square-jawed troops and of the brilliant plans of Boss Rolf to engineer our resurrection. Four hundred and seventy-eight dead, they report. Four hundred and seventy-eight. There were that many bodies in the twisted tenements South of Market, on Howard Street alone. The true number is in the thousands.
I must offer a shifting mosaic of characters and events as no one story could ever render up the heart of this great matter, of a wondrous and dangerous city that is no more. I rely upon a bit of hearsay, tales retold, on points of view disparate and even contradictory. I have used diaries and letters, from both the living and the dead, to construct my story. I must fictionalize, on some accounts, the words and actions of characters who neither I nor my legion of observers could record firsthand. Those instances are quite small in number. The liberties I take are minor.
What transpired here was a war for a city's heart that merely climaxed on April 18, 1906, at 5:13 A.M., a moment etched in the memories of all who survived. But if earthquake and fire is all that is remembered, then all is lost, for what we truly witnessed was a battle between good and evil the likes of which we have not seen outside of war itself.
Schmitz, Rolf, and Funston will no doubt twist any truth to convince you our demise was merely fate unavoidable, and whatever bad things this noble trio might have done, they did so with our welfare at the fore. Do not believe it. It did not have to happen. Good men and women, the unlikeliest of heroes, might have stopped it. The warning signs were everywhere.
The die was cast, not by the great earthquake but three days earlier, when the true heroes began to assemble. They were an unlikely lot: a runaway Kansas farm girl, a Chinese slave girl, a martyred fire chief, and a group of fearless young cops they called The Brotherhood. Lest anyone question the inspired significance of the cast, God, who loves a wild yarn as much as anyone, sent His voice, the great Enrico Caruso, to preside.
Most of all, there were the Fallons: Byron, a man whose belief in justice consumed him; Christian, his oldest son, a man at war with his own soul; and Hunter, the younger son, who found greatness before our eyes.
The story began, not on April 18, the day the Devil called, but three days earlier, when a remarkable young man named Hunter Fallon came home from Stanford University.
Remarkable indeed, for Hunter alone might have saved us.
-ANNALISA PASSARELLI