“Is that what they all believed?” I ask.
“Impossible to know,” Aunt Hortense says.
“Why did you get upset about that monkey?” I ask Uncle Karl.
“Consensus was that the monkey, guinea pig, and rat business was a stunt. Dr. Kinyoun, the so-called wolf doctor, concocted the whole thing to save his hide. Nobody thought the quarantine was warranted. He wanted to prove it was. I didn’t want to give credence to what everyone thought was pure nonsense.”
“It wasn’t much of a quarantine. There weren’t any doctors or nurses,” I say.
“Kinyoun had the power to call the quarantine, but he couldn’t get the rest of the medical community on board with it,” Uncle Karl explains.
“But he was right.”
Uncle Karl sighs. “He was right. We know that now. But, Peanut, I’m in the news business, not the history business. I have to call events as they’re unfolding. There wasn’t a reputable doctor in the whole state who thought this was the plague.”
“You know who else was right,” Aunt Hortense whispers. “Hearst.”
“Mary, mother of God, woman, do you have to bring that up?”
“Hearst printed plague stories to sell more newspapers. You did what you thought was right, Karl. You kept unfounded allegations out of the news.” Papa’s voice is quiet.
Uncle Karl stares at Papa. “I appreciate your saying that, Jules. Means a lot coming from you.”
Papa nods. His movements are slow, as if everything he does is painful.
“Even with all that, why would Dr. Roumalade try to give Maggy the Haffkine’s? He must have known she had the plague. Did he want to kill her?”
“Do you know for certain it was Haffkine’s?” Papa asks.
“I know it wasn’t Yersin’s,” I say.
“My bet is it was sugar water,” Papa says.
Uncle Karl nods. “Even Haffkine’s costs money. Roumalade must have figured a servant who has already contracted the plague is a lost cause. Better to give her the cheapest thing possible.
“Which reminds me, Mrs. Sweeting,” Uncle Karl continues. “I got a bill from Roumalade. He charged me an arm and a leg for the Yersin’s, which I was expecting. But his bill says he immunized three Kennedy servants. It was only Maggy and Jing.”
Aunt Hortense’s eyes flash to me. The look on her face is shocking. Does she know about Noah?
“That’s right. Two servants,” Aunt Hortense says. “But pay it anyway. I’m on that children’s hospital charity committee with his wife. I’d just as soon not have trouble with Hillary Roumalade.”
I’m helping Aunt Hortense write cards to all the people who sent flowers for Billy. We wear black and sit at a table in her sitting room with the big windows that open out to the balcony overlooking the garden. I watch her write. She has better handwriting than I do.
“Why do people keep secrets?” I ask her.
She looks up. “Because they don’t trust each other, I suppose, although there are all kinds of secrets. Some are harmless. Some are not.”
“It seems like there have been way too many secrets. I’m going to live the way Papa does. Straightforward and honest. No secrets.”
“You are, are you?” She dips her pen into the ink.
“Yes.”
She taps the excess ink from the nib. “In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need secrets. But the world’s a long way from perfect. Still, I try to be as straightforward as I can, which is a challenge, given who I’m married to.”
“If Billy had told us what he was doing, if he hadn’t kept it secret, we could have talked him out of it,” I say.
She stops. “Billy was headstrong. He wasn’t an easy one to sway.”
“If only he were here, and I could convince him now. I know just what I’d say.”
“Which is…”
“I’d tell him how important his life is to me and to Papa and to you and to Uncle Karl. I’d say he has to hold it gently in his hands as if it is the most precious thing in the world. And never ever trade it for money. I’d tell him money is only wrinkled old paper. It’s nothing at all compared to him, compared to his life.”
“I wish you could have told him that, too.” Her eyes search mine. “Lizzie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When were you going to tell me that Jing has a son?”
I cough, almost choking.
“I saw him with Jing. They look so much alike, it wasn’t hard to figure out.” She runs her hand along the pen feather.
I remember how Billy said Aunt Hortense is more complicated than I give her credit for, but there are some things she’ll never tolerate. Me dancing with Noah is one of them. I tread carefully.
“He’s about your age, isn’t he?” Aunt Hortense asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“But he’s not working for anyone.”
“No, ma’am.”
She nods. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“He wants to go to college,” I whisper. “Like me.”
One carefully shaped eyebrow rises. I hold my breath.
She turns away. “Of course you’ll need a proper education, Elizabeth, and then medical school…if you’re going to be a doctor.”
I gasp.
She looks back at me. “I wanted a different life for you. Your father wanted a different life for Billy. But that didn’t work, did it? You’ll have to”—she can hardly get the words out over the welling in her throat—“live your life your way.”
“Aunt Hortense!” I jump up and throw my arms around her.
“My goodness, Lizzie.” Her voice is husky. She takes out her handkerchief and tries to clean up her face. But as soon as she does, more tears come down.
—
At quarter to four, I check to see where everyone is in the house. Papa is in his room. He is still so sad about Billy that he can hardly eat. I know he will get through it, just as he did when Mama died, but right now it’s hard. Maggy is on the porch knitting. She’s almost all better. Aunt Hortense and Uncle Karl are at their house. Jing is in the kitchen adding sugar to a boiling pot of apples. The way he watches me, I know he knows that I’m meeting Noah.
“Lizzie,” he says as I open the back door.
“Yes, sir.” The word pops out of my mouth without me even thinking about it. Papa and Uncle Karl are always “sir,” but never Jing.
Jing’s shoulders pull back; his head rises. Our eyes meet. He doesn’t try to make me laugh. He has no frog in his pocket, no quarter in his ear, no feather or stone up his sleeve.
He stirs the apples. “Your mama would have been proud of you,” he says.
His words are warm inside me as I walk out to the barn. He has never said anything like this before.
Orange Tom lurks in the foggy darkening afternoon, his thick fur matted on one side, tail flecked with bits of leaves and straw.
I open the barn door. Noah stands petting Juliet’s muzzle.
“Lizzie.” He takes my hand. “I’m sorry about Billy.”
The heat of his hand warms mine.
We start to dance. Our first steps are stiff; then slowly the rhythm builds. My hand feels solid on Noah’s shirt as we circle the stable.
Noah steadies me. I don’t care if I make a wrong step when I’m with him.
We float together, breathing in the sweet smell of alfalfa. Only Juliet watches, slurping her water. John Henry is asleep.
I don’t want this to end. I hold on to every minute. The world is kinder with Noah holding my hand.
When he lets go, he crouches and pounces. He jumps back onto his springy legs and then up onto his hands.
One day, I’ll see Noah perform his lion dance in his costume with all of his friends. For now, it’s time to go. Aunt Hortense has come a long way, but I can’t upset her. Not now. Not after all we’ve been through.
One day, things will be different.
One day, she’ll understand that Noah is my friend.
“I’
ll be back soon,” Noah says.
I nod.
By the chicken coop, I capture Orange Tom. He doesn’t give me a chase this time. He simply allows me to scoop him up and carry him to my room. I write one last message. My hands shake as I wrap the red thread around the note.
University of California in 5 years
Noah,
Save me a chair.
I’ll be there.
Lizzie
Glossary
Transliteration Chinese Characters
Friend “pung yau”
Hello “nei ho”
Papa “ba ba”
Thank you “doh je”
Author’s Note
Chasing Secrets is fiction. Lizzie and Noah’s story is purely imagined. The account of the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco was true. I tried to stick to the facts as much as possible, but I altered the timing of some events. I took creative license in extending the time between when the guinea pigs and the rat died and the monkey’s demise. I moved up the forced immunization using Haffkine and only included one quarantine, when there were actually two. The chronology at the end of this section lays out the true dates of events.
THE CITY
“In 1900, white San Francisco was a sophisticated city of 350,000 people,”1 many of whom were freewheeling, chock-full of optimism and bravado. Some had become millionaires nearly overnight, finding their fortunes in the Gold Rush, the railroads, the Comstock silver mines, or the sugar business. The city was suffering the growing pains of turning a Wild West mining boomtown into the Paris of the Pacific. And though it was the Victorian era, in San Francisco there were “fewer rules and regulations than in well-established cities back East.”2
At the turn of the twentieth century, there were “only about eight thousand cars in the country.”3 Many people did not welcome the new contraptions. One of the reasons people were seeking to develop this form of transportation was because of the pollution caused by horses. Manure, dust, and dead horses on the street were all big problems. But the first motorcars were quite primitive. In early auto races, a car was considered successful if it reached the finish line. The winner of the first American race clocked in at seven miles an hour.4
Street performers were also a big part of the vibrant city life. Though the Astral Dog scene was fiction, the idea came from a memoir by Malcolm Barker about late-nineteenth-century San Francisco that included this line: “A trick dog knows which girl is your soul mate.”
CHINATOWN
Prejudice against the Chinese, who stood on the lowest rung of the immigrant ladder, was at its zenith at the turn of the twentieth century, and “Chinatown was the district San Francisco demonized.”5 Chinatown was its own city within San Francisco, an exotic ghetto crowded with twenty thousand Chinese Americans. Many white San Franciscans held the Chinese responsible for all manner of diseases and social ills.
“As long as times were good, the Chinese were accepted, but a late-nineteenth-century depression turned the tide. Formerly prized for their productivity, the Chinese now were cast as cunning and insidious job stealers.”6
Chinese children were not welcome in public schools:
The (Chinese) boys were sent to school; that is, to the Chinese school; they were not allowed to go to the European school. At that time, there was one public school of about four rooms, on Clay Street, between Stockton and Powell Streets, those in attendance being mostly Japanese and other races….The Chinese boys went to their own school.7
This account makes it sound as though Chinese girls did not attend school at all. I did find other sources indicating that some Chinese girls attended school along with Chinese boys. Donaldina Cameron, who appears in this novel, was a real person known as the Angry Angel of Chinatown. She made it her mission to rescue Chinese girls who had been sold into slavery.
MEDICINE
Rudyard Kipling once said, “Wonderful little our fathers knew. Half of their remedies cured you dead.” And that was certainly true of medicine in 1900, though it was a fascinating time, on the verge of epic change. Germ theory was in its infancy, yet many doctors did not understand—much less believe—the science behind it:
To the San Francisco citizens of 1900—even to most practicing physicians—the new bacteriology was still a form of black magic: mysterious, dimly understood, untrustworthy and inferior to the laying on of hands and the observation of symptoms at the bedside.8
Hospitals were widely distrusted. Doctors routinely made house calls and performed operations on kitchen tables. Many barely made a living. Better to have your son be a blacksmith or a bricklayer than a physician.
Some daughters of doctors did accompany their fathers on house calls. One such girl wrote: “Whenever it was possible, he took me with him on his calls in the country. I was always eager to go: I loved just being with him.”9 And from the memoir of a country doctor: “When the roads were good and the trip not too long, I took my black-eyed little daughter with me.”10
There were very few female doctors. And of course, women did not yet wear pants or have the right to vote, and they were often refused entry to bars, restaurants, and other businesses.
THE PLAGUE
Bubonic plague is one of the most feared diseases of all time, thought to be responsible for the death of one fourth to one third of the total population of Europe in the Middle Ages. It is generally* transferred from person to person via rat fleas. The fleas suck the blood of the infected rat. When the rat dies, the flea hops to a new host. The infected flea bites its new host and injects the plague directly into the bloodstream.
In 1897, Paul-Louis Simond discovered that rat fleas spread the disease. He published his findings, but his research had not yet been given the blessing of the scientific community. In 1900 the U.S. Surgeon General published a report stating that the plague was contracted by breathing contaminated air. Though incorrect, it was the prevailing opinion at the time.
Throughout history, there was anecdotal evidence that linked rat death to the plague. “An ancient Indian text the Bhagavat Puran, had, long before, warned people to leave their houses when a rat fell from the roof, tottered about the floor and died; for then be sure that plague is at hand.”11
San Francisco rat fleas differ slightly from Asian rat fleas and are less successful at plague pathogen transfer. This may be one of the reasons the plague did not do as much damage in San Francisco as it did in other locations. Even so, the plague is mysterious. As author Edward Marriott stated, “If diseases have personalities, plague is an escape artist, a criminal Houdini.”12 How, for example, did the scourge of the Black Death finally end? Nobody really knows.
THE FIRST PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN SAN FRANCISCO
On March 6, 1900, a Chinaman died of Plague in Chinatown and very soon thereafter others of his countrymen succumbed to the same dread disease. The local and federal health authorities were thoroughly alive to the situation from the start, but encountered innumerable obstacles in their efforts to control the disease. The story of how short-sighted commercialism connived with lying newspapers to deceive San Franciscans as to the actual presence and extent of the Plague is a black chapter in the history of this fair city which will never be given much space in a lay history.13
The wolf doctor, Dr. Joseph Kinyoun, was trained at the Pasteur Institute in the nascent science of bacteriology. He was able to extract the plague pathogen from the corpse of the first-known casualty and inject it into a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey. If the animals died, he believed it would confirm his plague diagnosis. But no one liked the arrogant, abrasive Dr. Kinyoun, and when first the rat and the guinea pigs and later the monkey died, it was easier to attribute the deaths to Kinyoun’s intervention than to the plague virus.14
The partial newspaper account in the text on this page is almost verbatim from Chung Sai Yat Po. Below is an extract from the Call.
After appearing in a continuous performance of three days, in a scientific farce, which proved to be a comme
rcial tragedy to San Francisco, the Bubonic Board of Health, relying on the testimony of a rat, a monkey and a guinea pig, left the footlights, raised the quarantine of Chinatown and left the city to recover, as best it can, from the widespread damage inflicted upon its trade and every other material interest.
What a spectacle the incident presents! The Chief of Police hurrying at midnight to rope in a quarter of the city; the Bubonic Board adopting the phraseology of grave emergency by bulletins that had “the situation well in hand” and in other terms promoting the belief that it had identified the plague and had given the pestilence a flying switch from the glands of a Chinese into those of a guinea-pig; the stolid indifference of the city; the inefficiency of the quarantine maintained by the Chief of Police, which it is said, Chinese boast of escaping by the payment of a dollar a head—all go to make a record of official imbecility, and worse that has not been equaled in the history of the city. It is enough to make the guinea pig grin.15
Still, clear evidence of the plague could be found. “In the Chinatown epidemic, eighty-seven dead rats, eleven dead of the plague, were found in the walls of a Chinese restaurant. Several cases of human plague had been traced to this place, but they immediately ceased when the rats were cleaned out.”16
The Yersin versus Haffkine immunization question also closely hewed to actual events. The Yersin’s did come from horses, and it was expensive. Medical personnel were given this immunization, which was thought to be more effective. The Haffkine immunization had significant side effects, and it was dangerous if injected into people who had already been exposed to the plague. There is now, however, some question about how effective the Yersin was—though that was not known at the time.
It is also true that the surgeon general “prescribed a mass vaccination of all the Chinese…[with Haffkine which] was violently unpopular in Chinatown.”17 And one girl did jump out the window rather than be immunized.18