“Thank you again, Mrs. Lewis,” Martin calls over his shoulder. “Just add what I owe you to my final bill. Oh, and here are your keys.” He stretches out his arm and the woman takes a step forward.
Mrs. Lewis looks fondly down at Kat as she takes the key ring. “Good-bye, Katharine. Come back and visit me?”
The child says not a word as Martin reaches for the doorknob.
Mrs. Lewis turns her attention back to me. “Please do come back and bring the child for a visit,” she says, her gaze like steel. “Anytime.”
“Thank you again for the cake,” I reply, unnerved by the woman’s stare.
Mrs. Lewis only nods and watches us leave. She is still standing at the threshold of the open door as we turn to begin the hill’s descent.
Her image is lost in a swirl of fog as we walk away.
4
The carriage will take us as far as the Hyde Street cable-car stop a mile away, Martin explains. As we ride, Martin tells Kat that I’ve come a long way to be her mother and that he expects her to be a good girl for me. He doesn’t want to come home from any of his travels to the news that she hasn’t been on her best behavior.
“I’m sure we’ll get along fine,” I say reassuringly, very much wanting Kat not to be afraid of me. “There were dozens of tots where I lived back home in Ireland, Kat. I used to help my mam mind some of them for the mothers who worked with their husbands with the nets. I lived in a fishing village.”
I was thinking Kat might warm to me a little knowing that, but the little girl says nothing. And Martin, who doesn’t seem concerned or surprised that Kat remains silent, says nothing, either.
Martin pays the driver after we step out of the carriage, and afew minutes later the three of us are boarding a red cable car trimmed in yellow and packed with other riders. Half of its benches are sheltered from the elements and half are open-air with only a brightly painted roof over the seats. A gentleman who’d been sitting offers me his place on a bench that is unprotected from the night air. I take it and then hesitantly pull Kat onto my lap. The child doesn’t object. The cable car begins to climb a long hill, stopping at each leveled block to take on new passengers and let off others. I can’t discern how the car is able to move with no motor or engine and no overhead wires. I ask Martin how this is possible.
“It runs on the steel rail underneath,” he says disinterestedly. “On a track. There’s a slot between the tracks where an underground cable runs at a continuous speed. The car grabs hold of the cable like a pair of pliers and gets tugged along.”
“But how does the cable run, then?” I ask.
Martin is too slow to reply. The man who gave up his seat and is standing near me is charmed by my interest and answers my question.
“The powerhouse over on Mason does the work,” he says proudly, as if he’d invented the cable car himself. “Large wheels spin the cable all day long with hydroelectric power. Quite an impressive thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. Such power, so easy to go unnoticed.
After a few stops, we get off and walk a few more slightly ascending blocks. The homes, some amply spaced apart and with views of the matrix of streets below, are nicely appointed with paned windows that are aglow with electric lights. The people who live in these houses are a world away from the tenementdwellers of the Lower East Side. For a fleeting moment I wonder why Martin didn’t pay the extra money for a sleeping car if he can afford to own a house in this neighborhood.
“Here it is,” Martin says, as we arrive at a three-story house on Polk Street. It is not as imposing as some of the other homes around it, but it is freshly painted a deep blue with ivory trim. Black ironwork adorns the railings and window boxes. As we walked, Martin told me the house is situated a few blocks from Russian Hill, so that I would know which part of the city we are in. It had lately been the home of a doctor and his wife and their two young sons. The doctor had taken a director’s position at a hospital in Argentina, and he and his family had left with only their personal belongings and a few housewares. Martin had bought the home fully furnished.
We step inside to a foyer lit by a chandelier of incandescent lights. My bag is set down by several other travel cases and trunks filled with Martin’s and Kat’s belongings from Mrs. Lewis’s, which had been sent over that morning.
“I’ll take all of those up later,” Martin says, nodding toward the collection of possessions. “I’ll show you the house first.” He begins to show me the place, room by room. Kat trails behind us and I’m fairly sure she’s seeing this house for the first time, too.
The downstairs consists of a sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and library. In the large kitchen there are hot and cold taps at the sink, an ample icebox, and a cast-iron cooking range piped for gas. There is a butler’s table and chairs with a view of the back garden and a pantry full of odd nonperishables that the doctor did not take and a few staples that Martin arranged to be delivered earlier that day. Next to the pantry is a door to a short staircase that leads down to a low-ceilinged boiler room. The back gardenhas been bricked in and there are empty terra-cotta pots awaiting attention and a painted wrought-iron garden table and chairs. A long and skinny flower bed, perfect for rows of daffodils, lines the tall wooden fence at the property’s edge. Over the top of the fence, I can see the upper back sides of homes on Van Ness, the next avenue over.
In the sitting room, upholstered sofas and chairs and ottomans in shades of rose and cream are situated in front of a gas fireplace framed in carved marble. A desk, chair, and matching bookshelves with volumes already tucked inside grace the library. The dining room table and breakfront are of the same warm-hued wood, which Martin tells me is redwood stained to look like cherry. Redwood is as plentiful here in this part of California as water in the ocean. The three upstairs bedrooms are furnished with bedsteads, bureaus, and wardrobes. The water closet on the second floor has indoor plumbing, glory be, and is tiled in black, white, and red. The third floor, with its pitched ceiling, contains two rooms. One is empty and looks as if it had perhaps been used for a maid’s room. The other room was painted along one wall with the images of farm animals. It has the look of a former playroom. Each second-floor room contains a gas fireplace framed with mantels and hearths of marble or onyx, and which Martin turns on with a key before we head back downstairs.
Though it is not the most spacious home on the street, to me it is a palace. I don’t know how much a house such as this one costs. I can’t help but wonder if Martin has sunk himself in debt to acquire it and that is why I’d not been sent a train ticket for a sleeping car. It is more beautiful than anyplace I could ever have hoped to call home.
Martin had also arranged for a cold supper to be delivered just before he came to the ferry terminal for me. It had been laid out in the dining room on plain white bone china plates that the doctor’s wife likely thought would not survive passage to Argentina. When Martin is finished showing me the house, we arrange ourselves at the table, choosing chairs that I suppose we will continue to sit in for every supper thereafter—Martin at the head, me on his right, and Kat on his left. Under the cloches are cold roasted chicken, pickled beets, and sweet peppers stuffed with rice and currants and capers.
No one says anything as we begin to eat.
“My gram used to make chicken like this,” I say after several long minutes.
Martin looks up from his plate. Meals for Martin and Kat have likely been very quiet of late. He smiles slightly, and it is not a bona fide invitation to continue but I simply cannot eat an entire meal in silence. I begin to tell Martin and Kat about Ireland. I tell them about Gram’s cottage on the hill, and my own family’s little house closer to the water, and the thousand shades of green on the hillsides and in the fields. I tell them about my favorite dishes that Gram used to make, like smoked eel with apple glaze and cinnamony sweet barmbrack.
After we finish, we move to the sitting room by the fireplace to eat slices of the little spiced cake Mrs. Lewis made. I tell them how my brothers and I would walk along the harbor wall when we were young, while little waves licked the slippery stones on one side and brightly colored fishing boats pulled on their mooring lines on the other, and that ahead of us would be the lighthouse, tall and as white as snow with its steady, fiery light. I tell themhow the bells at the Donaghadee parish church would ring out on Christmas morning and that I never tired of hearing them. I speak of only happy things, the things I miss.
When the hall clock strikes eight, Martin says it is time for Kat to go to bed.
