telegram. She saw him write “yet” on the form, then pause, look at it, cross it out, then look at it again. She didn’t say anything. He sent the telegram that allowed his brothers to infer that the two ladies had perished. By this time, names of some of those whose remains were being discovered were coming out. There were not so many—a few hundred, for which the mayor declared himself relieved and proud. But there were more. Everyone knew there were more. Everyone who had been there and escaped had seen more with his or her own eyes.
Andrew and Margaret could not stand talking about it anymore. She wrote a long letter to Lavinia, some sixteen pages, telling her as much about what had happened as she could, especially everything she knew, or suspected, about Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens. It would be her mother’s responsibility, after all, to fill in all the news and rumors. Even as she wrote this letter, she could imagine her words flying about the streets of Darlington and in and out of kitchens and parlors, alarming and electrifying everyone, including those who knew the Earlys only by sight. As for John Early and his wife, she told her mother to go to them first, share the letter with them first, so they would be prepared for the hail of gossip and well-wishing they would have to withstand. The letter took her two days to write. By the time she sent it off, it was eight days since the earthquake, or a year, or a lifetime. Then she began going to memorial services—for Mrs. Devlin, for other men who were lost, for everyone. Andrew went to the naval ones, but he wouldn’t agree when Mrs. Lear asked him if he would like to hold a service for his mother, or to include her in one.
Margaret had been to many a funeral over the years. She had found, at least back in Missouri, that a funeral was much like a wedding, in that the display was as important as the occasion. Everyone knew with a funeral, as with a wedding, that there would be considerable gossip afterward about the real nature of the deceased and what the funeral showed about the family—the neighbors could get inside the house and look around while the family members were distracted. But it was not like this at the memorial services for the earthquake victims. At these memorial services, people reflected, not upon just deserts, but upon miracles and tricks of fate, the perfect example of this being the memorial service for Mrs. Devlin, where her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter sat in the first row, between her father and her aunt. The weather was beautiful, and the windows were open to the sounds of birds singing in the trees outside. Prayers were said. Eulogies were made. Father Nicoll didn’t tell the story, but everyone knew what there was to know: Mr. Devlin, in his hasty trip to the city on the day of the quake, had had no luck, but later, there Mrs. Devlin was, in the middle of Beale Street, probably felled by bricks—her body was found next to a collapsed house. She was identified by the contents of her shopping bag, which lay underneath the body, unburned. The child, Emma, turned up in Folsom Street, many blocks away—almost to Ninth. She was shoeless, and her hair had been singed, but she was otherwise unhurt, walking about, crying. Had she been carried there by some kind person, then abandoned? Had she walked there? Every possibility seemed equally unlikely, and yet here she was, and she had no way of telling what had happened to her. How she was found was equally unlikely—two drunks, wandering from saloon to saloon in search of liquor, picked her up and took her with them. At their second or third stop, Mr. Devlin’s cousin, who was a sailor on Lieutenant Freeman’s ship, happened to be in that saloon, rounding up the drunken populace. He didn’t recognize Emma, but she recognized him. The cousin was detailed to take a ferry and bring her home. It was the very next ferry to arrive after the one carrying a distraught and hopeless Mr. Devlin. Emma’s father was wandering about the wharf, not knowing what to do next, when his cousin came running up to him and told him that Emma was found. The operation of larger forces, it seemed to Margaret as she sat at the memorial service,