The milkman eases his still-nervous horse away from the twisted rails beneath the wagon wheels and then starts south down Larkin Street, making his way around crumbled bricks and rubble that the quake has tossed into the street. More people are out now. Some are pushing baby prams full of hastily tossed belongings; some are pulling toy wagons loaded with travel bags. All are heading east, toward the ferries I assume, and away from houses they are afraid to stay inside or simply can’t. Others, dressed in nice clothes, and whose sturdy mansions surely survived the quake, are standing about, talking to one another, worried looks on their faces.
As the milkman slows to navigate wreckage in the street, I hear one woman dressed in finery ask another if she thinks it is safe to leave their homes unoccupied while they await utilities to be restored, because surely there will be looters. When disaster strikes there are always looters. The other says she doesn’t know but she is afraid to go back inside her house. Besides, her maid can’t even so much as make her a cup of tea. Her entire set of Royal Doulton is in pieces on the floor, and on top of that, the toilet isn’t working. The first woman says she’s returning to her house anyway.
We move past them and I hear the clang of a fire brigade as it bursts out of its shed. A man on the street yells that the wharf is on fire, and someone else answers that Market Street is on fire, too, as is a building south of Mission. Broken gas lines are sparking and feeding hungry flames. I look to the east, toward the bay, and it’s hard to see past the tallest buildings, a great many of which are still standing. But then I see a plume of slate-coloredsmoke, and then another farther to the south. The smoke is different from the dust: The dust hovers and then eventually falls; the smoke reaches for the sky like it means to own it. We pass a four-storied building just as it starts to cave in on itself, and the milkman urges Ginger away.
“My family is inside!” a woman yells, and I have to look away as several people rush to pull her back from the trembling building. Seconds later, the structure falls behind us and the horse spooks. Kat and I are tossed to the floor of the wagon as the animal lurches forward in fright. Several tense seconds pass before the milkman again regains control of the horse.
Kat and I are now thoroughly covered in milk and dust and dirt.
“Are you all right, love?” I pull Kat to me and brush broken glass off the skirt of her dress. She doesn’t answer, not even to nod yes or no. “We’ll be fine, we’ll be fine,” I coo to her as the wagon returns to a steadier pace. She leans into me, and that movement is almost like an answer to my question, but I don’t know which it is. Yes, she is all right, or no, she is not.
The damage from the earthquake is worse the farther south we head. I think I see St. Mary’s Cathedral off to my right, but it looks different, smaller, as if emptied of its sacredness. Some buildings have collapsed around it; some are leaning. There are all manner of people in the streets and on the littered walkways, dazed or crying or bloodied. Some are pulling at bricks and planks piled in heaps to rescue those trapped inside partially fallen buildings. I see a woman and man sitting on the crumbled steps of an apartment building with a dead child in the father’s arms. I look away from them and pull Kat close to me so that she will see only the front of my dirtied shirtwaist.
And then the massive city hall, that palatial block-long structure where I married Martin, comes into view and it is as though I am looking at drawings in one of Kat’s history books of the ruins of the Roman Empire. All those stately columns, massive and thick, are tumbled about like sticks. The dome still stands but has been stripped of its stone. It is skeletal, nearly obscene in its nakedness. Dust floats all around, like flurries of snow. I would not have thought a building of such size and elegance could be brought down by anything.
The Larkin Street entrance to the Central Emergency Hospital, a place I’ve had no occasion to visit but which I know is located in the basement of city hall, is partially obstructed by piles of stone and rubble. There is activity at the cave-like opening as nurses and people in plain clothes, passersby perhaps, pull out patients on gurneys and stretchers. Some are walking out on the arm of an orderly. Other people are arriving to the hospital, just like us, and are being told the destroyed hospital is being evacuated.
The milkman stops the cart and turns to me. “There isn’t no hospital no more!” he says.
Belinda grimaces beside him, her eyes screwed shut.
“Please just take us to wherever they are taking all the other patients.” I point to the line of evacuated and incoming injured in the street.
“I’ve done my part,” the milkman says. “I need to see about my own family. I’ve done my part!”
The sight of all those wounded people has him panicked, and I can see there will be no convincing him. I help Kat out of the wagon and grab hold of the travel cases. The milkman has the decency to help Belinda out of the passenger seat but is gonebefore I’ve asked her if she can walk, if she can follow the other patients who are walking on unsteady feet away from the great ruin of city hall. She nods.
I bend to Kat. “We need to help Belinda now, love. She needs us. The baby needs us. Can you carry your travel case, sweets? So that I can help Belinda walk? You hold on to my skirt with one hand and your travel case with the other, all right?”
Kat does not answer me, but she takes the handle of the case when I hand it to her, and when I guide her hand to my skirt, she grabs hold. I pick up my case with one hand and put my other arm around Belinda. We move toward the retreating hospital evacuees. When I am close enough to a nurse who is helping an elderly man in a hospital gown pick his way across the rubble, I ask where the patients are headed.
She looks back at me, and then at Belinda, and she shakes her head in pity.
“Mechanics’ Pavilion. Just across the street there.”
She points across the wide boulevard to the immense barnlike structure where just the night before costumed skaters competed for a prize. It appears to be undamaged. We took Kat to the pavilion on her birthday the previous summer to see the circus. I’d never seen so many people all in one place; eleven thousand seats ring the exhibition floor. The pavilion is a performance arena, not a hospital. And now, apparently, Belinda will deliver her child inside it.
We make our way across the street with the last of the evacuated patients and all the new incoming wounded.
The floor of the pavilion is being strewn with mattresses that have been brought in from the hospital and nearby hotels. A surgery is taking shape near the entrance with operating tables andtrays full of metal instruments, sharp and glaring. Nurses at the door are assessing by sight those of us coming inside.
Belinda is not bleeding from open wounds, nor cradling a broken arm, nor being pulled on a makeshift stretcher with maimed legs. She is a victim not of the earthquake, just of terrifically bad timing.
“Her baby is coming,” I tell the nurse who asks where she is injured.
“Is your home still standing? Can you not return and let her have the baby there?” the nurse says, in a frazzled, nearly scolding voice.
“Her baby is coming,” I say again. “A month early. And, no, we cannot return home. This woman doesn’t even live here in San Francisco.”
“All right, all right. I’ll see if we’ve a nurse who can be spared to help her,” she says, her tone softening. She calls over her shoulder for an orderly. “Take this woman to where we put the patients from the Female Ward.”
The orderly, a thin man whose uniform is spattered with bits of dried blood and dirt, nods and motions for us to follow him.
Belinda grabs me as a labor pain seizes her. “It hurts!” she wails.
“I know,” I tell her. I do know how it hurts. I sweep the remembrance away. That was from another life, another time.
We are led past teams of people placing more mattresses on the floor and doctors treating the injured as they get to them in turn. The orderly shows us to a collection of mattresses on the arena floor grouped like a little dormitory. Four on one side and four on the other. Women of various ages, attired in hospital gowns and lying on these beds, watch us arrive. There are nosheets on the mattress Belinda is given. No pillow. No privacy curtain.
