Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
Two days after Gertie’s recovery from septic shock, Loretta sat with me in the parlor of my suite and spoke of her long-ago losses and how she met Franklin.
Whether I was just a friend of the family or her daughter by adoption, her story was part of mine, as mine was part of hers.
It was added to the shelves of my inner library.
She had known much terror and more horror than she would ever reveal to Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry. She and I were bonded now by the secret of Gertie’s recovery, which encouraged her to share more with me. However, she had another reason for being forthcoming.
I will include here only the bare essence of what she told me, bleaching the terror and horror into pale facts.
Before Loretta was born, her father and mother—Charles and Eunice Bramley—immigrated to America from England.
He was a skilled tailor. She was a talented baker.
Opportunities in their homeland were so limited that they needed to build their future half a world away, in San Francisco.
Loretta was born on March 14, 1897, three years before her folks purchased a home in the heights.
On April 18, 1906, the quake struck at 5:13 a.m., shortly after she dressed for school.
It was 8.3 on the Richter scale. The house was badly damaged, but she escaped without injury.
Her parents had already left for work. When she stepped outside, the smoky streets were crowded with wailing, bleeding people.
Hitched to wagons, injured dray horses were dying—or dead and stiff-legged—in their traces.
Clusters of corpses had spewed forth into the street with the shattered substance of the hotels and apartment buildings.
Loretta needed more than an hour to make her way down through the broken city as isolate flames began to join in great tides of fire.
She arrived at the bakery where her mother had become the manager—and saw the woman’s battered corpse being loaded onto the bed of a horse-drawn wagon filled with the dead.
Now, taking advantage of a lap blanket draped over the arm of her chair, Loretta pulled it around her to ward off the chill of memory.
She said, “Hundreds, if not thousands, were dead. The city needed to spare itself from the worst diseases that would be spawned from legions of cadavers, so some were buried in communal graves. Often there was no way to identify the bodies and no one to make a record of them. I never knew where they interred my mom. The tailor shop where my dad worked was ashes. Perhaps nothing of him remained but bones. I never found out.”
I began to understand how she had become the woman she was. Hardship had not broken her; it tempered her as a sword is tempered by heating and quenching. She was lovely and gentle, but she was also steel.
She said, “I headed back home, though the house was damaged. I didn’t know where else to go.
The city had grown dangerous. Looters. Drunks.
Men who, in the face of Armageddon, no longer had moral reservations regarding rape.
As the afternoon faded into evening, the noise grew noisier—shouting, laughter, drunken singing.
Screams in the distance were those of women, children.
Structures continued to fall—roaring, rattling, echoing across the hills. ”
Being a child with no living relative of which she was aware, with no inheritance pending, Loretta became a ward of the state.
South of San Francisco Bay, the community of San Jose suffered some damage, but a state-operated orphanage there agreed to accommodate her and other children in her circumstances.
The court commended her to Mercy Village until her eighteenth birthday.
As I listened for more than an hour, I had moved forward on my chair, until I sat on the edge of it.
“Mercy Village,” Loretta said, “was merciless, but that’s a story for another time.
I’ve told you all this and brought you to the orphanage so you’ll understand what I’m about to share.
It’s something I’ve found strange and wonderful since we walked out of Blue Mood with you more than three years ago, but after what you did for Gertie, it’s stranger and more wonderful than ever.
Two things got me through those ugly years at Mercy Village.
One was Franklin, who also had been taken there, but that’s for him to tell.
The other was a future that I imagined for myself.
I spent hours every day elaborating on it.
That future was the hope that sustained me.
I imagined I’d fall in love with a fine man.
We would take on the world together and never back down.
We’d be something, build a business to ensure we never wanted for anything.
There would be children, a family so strong that nothing could tear it apart.
Of course that man became Franklin. And here’s the strange, wonderful thing, Adiel.
This family I imagined would include a girl whom we adopted.
She would be a girl who, like me, had lost everyone and everything.
We would embrace her as ours no less than the children we made together.
That was my childish bargain with God, Adiel.
If I promised to save a girl as miserable as I was, swore I’d give her all the world has to offer, then God would be obliged to give me the future I wanted.
Bargaining with the deity is wrong and silly.
It reduces Him to an old rug merchant or used-car salesman.
Of course, it’s what children do. And not just children. Sorry. I’m babbling.”
“Not at all,” I disagreed. “I believe in miracles. You saved me from Captain. You are my miracle.”
Years had passed since I’d thought about what Captain might have done after Loretta and Franklin paid him off, what my few little “daymares” might have meant.
Having mentioned his name, I found myself wondering what fate had befallen him.
He surely hadn’t built the small retirement home on the oceanside lot.
He would have realized that sitting on a porch and staring at the sea for the rest of his life wasn’t for him.
He needed to feel important, respected, feared.
Holding power over others gave his existence meaning.
I pitied whoever was currently his chattel, and I was grateful that he was out of my life.