Fault Lines (v1.0), page 3
It was not fear that destroyed their marriage, it was the shock of the strange—future shock, not named, not to be named for another century, but a fact then as it is now.
Geneva hated the coast, feared the sea and the sudden storms that churned the water and drove bitter cold fogs bland. She despised San Francisco, called it Satan’s playground. There were more babies and now Hilliard started construction on the house. It was built on land high over the city, above the fogs presumably, on the slope of what has since been named Russian Hill.
It took a year to build the house. Philippine mahogany, Belgian crystal chandeliers, chestnut paneling in the dining room, the entire southern exposure glass-enclosed with a wide Italian tile terrace outside. Hilliard was living his most treasured dream and loved it all. He was here, there, everywhere bossing the laborers, giving a hand with the stonework of the fireplace in the master bedroom, supervising the building of a wine cellar, consulting with suppliers. ...
And Geneva kept on having babies. William, my father, was her last, the eleventh, and she never hated San Francisco less than on the day she wrote to her mother: “The Ground is never still and the Air is full of Clouds day and night with a Perpetual Rain that is either falling, has fallen or will Fall within the next few minutes. Sometimes the Rain hangs in the Air for days before it touches the ground. Chinamen Heatherns swarm in Town until I am too fearful of Them to venture outside these Walls that are like a Prison....”
I found the letter in my father's papers. Perhaps he was sent to post it and forgot.
Poor Geneva, a prisoner in her mansion, forever a stranger in this land, forever yearning for the serenity of the Kansas fields, the sun glare in an endless sky, the austerity of the wooden church and pews, the comfort of her religion, which seemed so elusive in San Francisco, the devil's playground.
Hilliard built a box-house in 1868 and stayed there most of the time afterward, as far as I could tell from my father's narrative, doled out in crumbs over the years. A box-house, or French theater, was more than Geneva's Southern Baptist training could tolerate. There was music and dancing downstairs, a bar, tables for gambling, even a stage for entertainment. But its main attraction was upstairs where there were intimate dining rooms, each one large enough for only two, furnished with red velvet hangings, white linens, fine silver and crystal, and a divan.
In the sixties there were troubles in the mining country of Montana. Fire storms swept thousands of acres of parched forests in a continuing drought several years in a row. Water vanished. There was a depression in the early seventies and the price of copper plummeted. There were strikes and strike breakers and scabs and they fought with one another, and all of them fought against the ranchers who wanted and needed the scarce water that was being dissipated and polluted, and then there was an earthquake. It wasn't a major quake and no lives were lost, but several mines were buried under avalanches of rock.
The big mining companies held out during the depression, using the time to modernize their equipment, to bring mechanization to their mines. When there were demands for copper, they undersold the independents consistently. Finally, after half a dozen trips to his own holdings, and lengthy negotiations, Hilliard was forced to sell. A year later he was shot to death either inside his own box-house or outside it on the street William, my father, was ten.
Geneva wasted not a moment. As soon as Hilliard was in the ground she began selling. Everything portable was carried away, everything permanent was sold where it stood. There were more debts than anyone had realized; her fortune was not great, but it was enough to move herself and her family back to her beloved Kansas. And she planned to do that as soon as the legalities permitted. She had no doubt that Hilliard's murder was God’s just punishment.
I’ve often wondered about those hard-core fundamentalists, spending years of their lives on unadorned, uncushioned wooden benches. I wonder if after so many generations the babies aren't born with calloused bottoms. Perhaps they are and no one ever mentions it to outsiders, but they have the perfect means of identifying their own. I could imagine them approaching the Pearly Gates, the men dropping their trousers, women lifting their skirts, exposing their buttocks for admittance. ... I never dared tell my father this fantasy. He spoke mildly of his mother and her yearning for home, and it was his audience, his children, who burned with hatred and resentment of her.
My father used to tell us the next part of the story almost as a ritual. You have to visualize the house to understand it, though. The house is three stories, with a basement and an attic. There is the entrance foyer, with a marble floor, and in his youth tubs of plants all about, some palm trees even. To the right is the formal drawing room, about thirty-five feet square, with a massive fireplace, and a curved staircase winding upward out of sight. There were two chandeliers in this room, parquet floors, Persian rugs, the walls covered with tapestries, stained glass panels outlining the windows, and so on. A Victorian monstrosity. It was like that throughout the house. Room after room, each done differently, with paneling, chandeliers, fireplaces, French windows, window seats curving under bay windows, a sun room jammed with tropical plants, exotics, whatever was costly aud rare.
On the second floor there are six bedrooms and a large playroom where the children had classes with a private tutor. My grandmother refused to send them to school outside the house for fear the Chinamen Heatherns would kidnap them and sacrifice them on bloody altars.
The third floor has six more bedrooms, but they are smaller and less ornate, and four of them were used by servants. The attic Is long, narrow, very dark; it housed a colony of bats. Or so my grandmother told the children, perhaps to keep them out of it.
There are two sets of stairs, the curved, wide steps leading up from the drawing room and another, narrower staircase in the rear of the house. The building is a children's heaven of hiding places, for games, of private nooks for quiet moments.
My father was ten, his brother David eleven, when the attorney first started showing prospective buyers through the house. The two boys, never far from each other, crept through the house miserably, hiding behind posts, behind tubs of palm trees, under staircases, listening, trying to force the buyers away with great efforts of will. They skulked about, always out of sight, always listening, prying, watching, and hating everyone who came to look.
They made plans to remain in the house when it was sold, to live in it forever, always out of sight, sneaking out at night to forage, never suspected. ... A Mr. and Mrs. Wyckoff returned several times and brought a decorator with them, and mentioned to the attorney that finally they had found a house large enough for their eight children.
William and David knew their plan was doomed. There was no way they could hide from that many children, any more than a stranger could have hidden from them.
“We went to the cellar where we had our bundles hidden and sat down and looked at the stuff and at each other and I guess we were both crying. I know David was. I kept thinking there had to be a way. Our father had told us where there was gold, and we believed him, and knew that if we ever got back to that Kansas farm we’d never leave it again. Mother would buy a farm and put us to work on it from sunup to dark every day but Sunday, and on Sunday we’d sit in church all day. We knew all that.” My father would pause then and look through time, seeing that boy and his brother just as I had looked back to see myself dancing at the edge of the lava. I wonder if he reached back and reassured the boy that it would work, if that reassurance had been felt somehow, had given the boy the courage he had needed to go through with the next plan they devised.
"I said to David, ‘I just ain’t going.' And he looked at me with his mouth opening and I knew he had meant to say exactly the same words to me. And in that second we decided. We were not going to be dragged back to a com field in Kansas. We would hide and after she was gone with the others we'd work and save our money and when we had enough we'd go find that gold our father had told us about”
“But how did you live?” one of us always asked, usually Wanda or I. Randolf seldom asked anything or commented; he sat unmoving and watched the story unfold as if in a trance. I have always felt sorry for Randolf; he should have run away from home to prospect for gold when he was young. I see that same hungry yearning searching look sometimes when he is preoccupied staring out a window at nothing at all. No one should go through life with that hunger gnawing away inside.
But Father would not be hurried, or be cajoled into telling his story out of sequence. “The house was like a crazy asylum those days, my mother and the older children running around packing, sorting through stuff, servants packing, hauling, carrying, nailing up crates, and us younger children being chased out of one room after another, ordered out to play, or to run fetch this or that. Some of the girls kept on crying all the time. They were afraid of Indians in Kansas: they knew what had happened to their grandparents and aunts. Some of the older boys were talking about getting guns and going Indian bunting, and about the horses they would breed and make a million dollars a year. And Mother was everywhere at once. You'd think a woman who'd had eleven children would have been tireder than she was, but she managed to boss every bit of the packing, the sorting, stacking of crates into separate areas—stuff to be shipped on ahead, stuff to be taken, stuff being sold, given away. She was a woman of iron. David and I used to whisper ourselves to sleep at night, and we mostly talked about what she would do to us when she found us.” He paused and thought, then said, “We were planning to hide out, but we didn’t expect to get away with it That's how it was. We were going to make the effort as if we expected success when all the time we were worried about what she'd do to us when she found us again.”
The night before the move, the boys crept from the house into the woods that were thick then on Russian Hill. There were groves of iron oak and pine, with places that had no under-story growth at all, having been grazed clean by the herds of goats that ranged on the steep slopes, but with other places as dense as any African jungle with tangled briars and creeping vines. They had made a “cave,” concealed it with boards covered with brambles, and inside it they waited for the next four days. Two times they heard the voices of the searchers come near, then recede.
My father was reticent about the next few weeks. They stole food, eggs from the small farms on the hill, vegetables and fruit from the gardens, whatever they could find. The search on the hillsides was abandoned and resumed in Chinatown. Geneva had become convinced that the Chinamen Heatherns had abducted the boys, that they were either on their way to China already for the private foul amusements of a greasy warlord, or else were being hidden in a swampy, rat-harboring basement, waiting for the right vessel to dock that would then take them to their unspeakable fates.
Later, when they slipped into town to take up life in the streets, the boys found posters offering a reward of five hundred dollars for information leading to their safe return to their mother's bosom. No one informed on them. No one even noticed them. It was not uncommon for boys of ten or eleven to be out working. For a time they toyed with the idea of having one of them turn in the other, collect the reward, and then escape once more, but this time with a stake. Their talk now was simple bravado; they were frightened and cold and hungry most of the time; by accomplishing what they had said they would do, they seemed to have destined themselves to early deaths from exposure or starvation. They talked even less persuasively of giving themselves up, of voluntarily returning to their family, to the corn farm in Kansas, taking up the plow, etc., etc.
Perversely, they began to feel that their mother had abandoned them, that she had welcomed the opportunity to leave them behind. If she hated them so much that she left them in the cold, foggy city without money, food, or clothes then she would never allow them to return. Gradually the talk of going home faded from their conversations.
They stole when they could, they sneaked into empty buildings and slept when they could, and finally David got a job on the wharf, cleaning a fishing boat. Now they had food and a small but reliable income, and eventually William also was hired by the boat captain and for the next few years they made out.
“Tell us about the gold,” Randolf would say, tired of the tribulations.
Father nodded. He was almost ready to tell about the gold. But first, just a little bit more about San Francisco and the life they led. “We stayed on the docks most of the time, working, running errands, listening, watching, fighting, doing what boys have been doing since the beginning of time. San Francisco was booming again after the depression, buildings going up everywhere, the bay getting filled with garbage to make even more land. Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill were getting crowded with mansions, each one grander than the last. The railroads were being built all over the coast and the railroaders were back and forth spending their payrolls; miners with new gold to spend; schools getting built; streets put in; it was alive like it's never been since. A miner would come in with a new strike and the next day you'd have thought a plague had struck and the population had been scared away, the way they trekked out. There were ships from all over the world, bringing in immigrants—Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Irish, German. . . . And that was before the big flood of Russians who were refugees from the war with Japan. David and I never went to school much those days”—he didn't fool us, we knew he hadn't gone at all again until he was grown—“but we picked up stuff— enough Spanish to get by, a smattering of Russian, a bit of Chinese and French. And we read a lot, whatever we got our hands on. We saved some money so that we could buy a kit and head for the hills.”
Randolf would shift nervously and lean forward now. He didn't care about early San Francisco. He wanted to hear about living in the wild hills and finding gold.
“We had a mule, tools and a Civil War musket, food and the clothes we wore. David was sixteen, I was fifteen, and we headed east by northeast. Our father had spoken of the most likely places that he intended to get back to one day, places be said he knew had gold just like he knew the sun would come up. There had been a strike in Alaska and the real gold-fever victims had headed up that way by then, but we weren't quite ready for that, and besides, we knew where there was gold. We never doubted a minute that our father knew what he was talking about.
It never occurred to us that if he had been that certain he might have gone up to Rogue River and dug up the fortune himself."
He told about the hardships of the long trip up the California valley, through the redwood and Douglas fir forests, where they skirted logging camps, having heard many rumors of the loggers that were frightening enough to make young boys more wary of them than of the Indians who still made sporadic raids through the area. They lived on game as much as possible, hoarding their beans and salt pork in anticipation of the long cold wet winter they knew lay ahead of them.
Sometimes, thinking of those two boys, hardly more than children, surviving in the wilderness for sixteen months as they did, I wonder if my own son, Scotty, could have lived through their ordeal, and I decided he couldn't have. A year and a half without vitamins, penicillin, allergy treatments, shelter. ... He would have died. He broke out in hives on a two-week camping trip and had to be hospitalized.
They found gold, almost exactly where their father had said it would be. It wasn't a large strike, not a bonanza to flood the area with miners, but it made them both wealthy enough for my father to decide to head East and go to school, and for David, who was eighteen, to equip himself for a trip to Alaska and the even richer fields there.
My father went to school, then to the Columbia University School of Mines and came out a geologist. He went to Germany and studied some more, then on to France, England, and Italy, back to the States, where he met and married my mother and took her home to San Francisco. He bought back the house with the rest of his fortune. Two years later the big earthquake struck and the next day I was bom. My mother hated San Francisco from then on.
I had a phone call from Scotty a week or so ago. He was calling from Ponta Delgada in the Azores.
“Mother, it’s fantastic! In some places it looks like toothpaste was squeezed out of a tube and fell over. In other places you can see ooze lines where lava started up, then the process stopped and there is just this long line of basalt bubbles. Lava hangs from some of the upthrusts like oversized grapes. It flowed and made formations exactly like travertine curtains in caves. . .
Scotty is a geologist. I wonder if there is a gene that causes geology to erupt in the bloodstream. He is with a team studying the mid-Atlantic rift nearly two miles under the Atlantic Ocean. I can't bear to think of him in that tiny ocean craft, sinking, sinking. ... Of course, he assures me often that the Alvin is the safest submersible ever built, and I think but never say, like the Titanic.
The excitement in his voice caused me to smile and think fleetingly of that small girl who danced at the sight of a lava field. “This is creation itself, Mother! Material coming up from the depths of the earth to create new lands!”
My father had been just as excited when he read an article about the discovery of mountains under the Atlantic Ocean. “It's Atlantis!” he had said. “Plato was right all the time. The land was submerged by a catastrophic earthquake, and one day, in your lifetime, man will find a way to get down there and explore those mountains just like they’re exploring mountains on the surface of the earth, uncovering gold, silver, diamonds. Down there they'll find the ruins of a civilization so advanced they'll make us look like primitives!”
My son: "It’s creation, Mother! Land is being created now, at this time, spreading the ocean floor, widening it, taking the North American continent farther from Africa to accommodate the land that is being formed.”
