A-Splendid-Ruin(11)
Goldie gave me an odd look. “He’s just being clever. That’s what makes his columns the best.”
“You mean it didn’t happen?”
“Oh, I’m certain it did. Hannah will be furious because he’s made it obvious she was drunk, and her father will no doubt ask for an apology. Mr. Bandersnitch always presses too close to the unacceptable. That’s why everyone reads him. One day the Bulletin will fire him for it. But what about us? Are we mentioned anywhere?”
“There’s nothing in the column from last night, Goldie. Probably it just hasn’t been written yet.”
Goldie considered. “Perhaps you’re right.” She adjusted her hat in the elaborate foyer mirror. “Yes, of course you’re right.”
We went to the waiting brougham. I climbed inside while Goldie instructed the driver to take us to the Emporium, and then we were off, and I had the first true glimpse of the city that was to be my home.
That morning’s fog had retreated to the hollows, on the run from a watery sun. On my arrival yesterday, the fog had been too heavy for me to make out more than the ghostly shades of buildings, though I’d marveled that it was cobblestones that the carriage bounced along, not muddy ruts. Even now, knowing that mansions existed, it was hard to put aside the vivid impressions I’d had from the magazines passed around by the ladies in the boardinghouse. Bret Harte’s tales of campfires and mining towns.
From the top of the hill, we quickly passed into a neighborhood of wooden buildings, many decorated with unusual designs. Signs and windows advertised businesses in Chinese writing; women carried baskets and bunches of produce from stands lining the narrow streets where children played and men with single braids like Au’s gathered, all wearing flat shoes and dark tunics and trousers and hats.
Goldie said, “Chinatown.”
It was like nothing I’d seen before, and I was curious about it, but then I remembered Goldie’s talk of tongs.
She went on, “It’s perfectly safe in the daytime, but you should not come here at night.”
As quickly as we passed into Chinatown, we were out again, crowded now by houses with bay windows and others with gingerbread trim. We went into downtown, with its wires stretching from the many telephone and telegraph poles webbed above the sidewalks and its many-globed gas streetlamps decorating filthy streets scrimmed with urine and manure, and I was reminded of home. Crowds of peddlers and carts placidly ignored carriages and horses and wagons and automobiles, and people barely avoided disaster as they raced across the cable car tracks that ran down the center of the street. A man with a dozen dead rabbits and just as many birds slung from his belt called out, “Wild rabbits! Ducks! Get your game here!”
It was not New York, but it had that same deep city throb that reverberated from the ground into my heart, a pulse born of shouts and the rumble of iron rims on cobblestones, clanging cable cars, groups of men talking in the streets, men on bicycles calling out warnings as they swerved and changed direction as quickly as houseflies, stray dogs barking, and newsboys hawking headlines. Yet it was also unfamiliar, and it was more than just the tang of the sea in the air instead of the green rot of oily rivers that made it so, or the streets so steep that everything must pause halfway up to rest. San Francisco breathed expansiveness and change. It was unsettling, but exciting too, and something in me stirred and stretched, the thrill of starting anew.
The carriage stopped before a giant stone building of Beaux-Arts design with a huge arched entranceway and windows lining the front.
“The Emporium. I imagine you’ve never seen a store like this,” Goldie said.
“We have stores in New York.”
“Not like this,” she said smugly. “We can get nearly everything you need here, and the rest at the City of Paris.”
It was true that the store felt different than those in New York. Not because of its size, but because for me the department stores in New York had been places only to daydream, and even then, those dreams had been about working there as a salesgirl, walking crisply down those aisles, taking orders. I’d never thought to covet anything inside, because I’d never been able to afford any of the things they sold.
Goldie said, “We’ll probably have to throw your clothes out once your trunks arrive. I’m sure you’ve nothing that’s right for San Francisco. The weather is completely different, for one thing. You’ll never need anything heavier than a wool coat.” She tossed scarves around my neck and trailed gloves over my arms until I felt like a bedecked maypole while the salesman trailed after us with bobbing steps and an obsequious “That color is lovely as well, miss.”
There was so much that she insisted I needed: cartwheel hats blooming with flowers, patterned shirtwaists, skirts and walking suits, tea gowns and shoes. Goldie preferred bolder colors, and pooh-poohed my every suggestion of anything more sedate. “I told you, you’re in San Francisco now, May.” I would have preferred more subtlety, but Goldie lived in society; I’d only watched it from afar, and so how should I know that owls on hats were in vogue and that white gloves were on the wane and bright colors much more the thing?
I stood in the alterations room while a dressmaker measured and pinned and Goldie circled with a finger pressed to her full lower lip, saying, “I don’t like the way that drapes. You can cut that bodice a bit lower. Yes, to there.”