AT THE GENTLE MERCY OF PLANTS -- ESSAYS AND POEMS

Wildfire: Berkeley, 1923

I HAVE OFTEN wondered why there seem to be so few people who remember the historic Berkeley fire of fifty-one years ago, in which in two hours' time sixty entire city blocks rose to the sky in smoke. The explanation is simple. People have not forgotten; they have merely grown old and died. I myself, by no means young, am yet young enough to have been in Berkeley on that ugly day and still be alive to recall vividly the hot wind, the fear, and the hell of the occasion. My mother and I had recently come from the well-moistened Middle West and knew nothing about the tinderlike character of our new environment. The fire of that seventeenth of September was the first conflagration of a landscape we had ever seen, and its speed and proportions, as well as the possibility of its occurrence at all, were as unexpected to us as a tidal wave would have been in the front yard. Those catastrophic hours came to an end just as the firefighters were about to blow up buildings along Hearst Avenue, at the north edge of the campus. The wind reversed and drove the flames back over the ashes, where nothing remained to burn, and the firemen laid down their  dynamite.

Because of certain bizarre and poignant circumstances, the fire held for my mother and me an anguish beyond the scope of public tragedy, and, as the anniversary of the day approaches, I feel stirred to set down my memories. Indeed, for all these fifty-one years I have thought them worth setting down. My account is obviously not the one to be found in newspapers of that date, yet it is a true report. For it to be complete, however, it must begin long before the fire itself, with a suggestion of what kind of people we were and why we were in Berkeley in the first place. It must include the memories of material things having no relation to the fire except their endurance of its destruction but retaining for me a visible shape that still escapes from under the black weight of shock and loss that fell on two frantic women that blazing day.

In the summer of 1915, my mother had come West to the famous Panama-Pacific International Exposition of San Francisco. She brought me with her, the youngest of three daughters, my curls, because of her loving belief in my ever-extant childhood, worn long, though I was sixteen. We stayed in Berkeley. The exhilaration of the Bay region, the presence of the university, which, it was immediately surmised, I should someday attend, and, most important, the thrilling white-stone lure of the Greek Theatre on the campus combined to bring us back seven years later. The Greek Theatre is built of concrete, not stone, and the effect is gray, not white, but I am sure that a white stone amphitheatre among odorous eucalyptus trees where celebrated men and women of the stage were as thick as blue jays was the image that meant California to my mother and drew her to the Coast.

In her childhood, Mary Ellen Hockett, at the top of a tall shaking ladder, had nervously but rapturously played the part of Little Eva entering Heaven just under the rafters of a smalltown school. That first glorious view into the fascination of the actor's world was the beginning of much that followed in her life, and in mine as well. She was born Quaker, a birthright that would be no hindrance today to involvement with the stage but in her time meant a variety of rich and worthy sorts of guilt to afflict her -- at least, now and then. Fortunately, because she was talented and lovely to look at, her vanity often saved her from the influence of her conscience. The luminous tragedians, the delightful fantasy-makers of the theatre were her idols, and in our home the impressive names of Mrs. Siddons, Irving, Maude Adams, Alla Nazimova were more familiar than the names of patriots or dull characters from the Bible. The excitements of hope, the hard continuity of work, the momentary flash of success, and the darkness of failure -- these are the facts of life in the amateur as well as the professional theatre, and they were the first facts of life I learned as a child, not from my own life but from my mother's. She was eventually one of the founders of the Little Theatre movement, one of its proudest slaves. As an actress, she gave, among other roles, touching and poetic performances of Deirdre and Kathleen ni Houlihan.

She was a good director, and behind the scenes she could with a pin and two lengths of tulle, save the world for a quivering Titania who had forgotten her wings in a taxicab. She was a religious woman whose true vocation was the theatre. It was Heaven to her, and she gave it pure and serious veneration to her last days, when she sat dying and crocheting and working on one-act plays never to be produced. In the year 1922, it could have surprised no one -- least of all my mother -- that, my father being dead and my sisters gone to careers of music and writing in New York and Paris, she had fallen easily and contentedly to the temptation of selling her home, seeing her goods into a freight train, and, in a spirit that might be described as adventurous caution, crossing the continent to return to the city that held the renowned Greek Theatre.

***

COMING BACK TO California to stay, my mother purchased a small two-story, house in the northern, hilly part of Berkeley. Like so many dwellings there, it was covered with redwood shingles. It was well designed, spacious and useful for its size, and very good for two people intimately concerned with each other. To my mother I was, and was to become more so, the main consolation in her widowhood, while to me her subtle, silent, and self-effacing need for compliance and amiability was a claim never to be denied. A half century ago, this was a common enough mother-daughter relationship. An engaging, well-composed little house was just the place to enclose our daily life of manners and devouring affection. The house sat up from the street on Euclid Avenue, with a stone retaining wall and a row of pepper trees in front. It was nicely served by a small streetcar that bounded past not too often. My mother had the trim on her house painted the color of jade. It was a conspicuous and rather lighthearted decoration, but perhaps the new owner needed to provide evidence to herself of confidence, apt as she was to be caught between an impulse of freedom and startled amazement at what she had done. At the corner near our house was one designed by the architect Bernard Maybeck, who had created the Palace of Fine Arts at the Exposition -- a memorable example of romance and exalted unreality fit to uplift visiting spirits free for a while from mundane lives, and even meant to inspire the mind of the West, fascinated more and more by its own domain and destiny. Beyond us in the other direction and adjoining our place was a vacant lot, perhaps a hundred feet wide, containing only weeds and grass and of no interest, though later to become of tremendous importance to us.

We were to live in this house and Berkeley of the university and the Greek Theatre for one year. That one year was rich in the drama for my mother -- Ibsen, Moliere, Shaw, Dunsany, Browning, Shakespeare, Materlinck, Yeats, Sophocles, Euripides; Margaret Anglin declaiming the sorrowful, flashing words of Phaedra to the stars and the hard seats of concrete. My mother's flight to the West was justified. During our brief occupancy, her old American cherry and mahogany furniture sat becomingly in the new home, with various oil paintings of midwestern meadows and the usual soft, dreaming cows, of sunsets through bare purple trees, a copy of Anton Mauve's tired walk home after the day's work, and, above the fireplace, a fierce and moody seascape. A dirty, melancholy rain always seemed just about to pour from it, and some practical critic had once suggested putting a bucket under it. Also in the Berkeley living room and giving it the true feeling of being our home was a carved rosewood parlor set of sofa and chairs bought in New Orleans when our family spent the winter there. It was upholstered in green brocaded horsehair, and from my youngest days I was obsessively attached to it, haunted by an eerie faith in green horses. A choice pedestal table that had a secret drawer, an inlaid settee, a tall secretary, and Oriental rugs gave to my mother's living room the appearance typical of many American homes in those days, when taste and very little money could acquire what used to be quite ordinary treasures and are today costly antiques. Because we were so fond of them, they seemed to offer our own courtesy to anyone who entered the house.

Like most families who make a move, we brought with us things that could more sensibly have been left behind or more luckily lost en route. The masterpiece of foul weather was one of them. Also two barrels of despised hand-painted china, which made the trip without a crack or chip. "If they should ever come to visit us," my mother, while packing, had said in one of the resonant whispers often heard in our home, "how could I explain if I left it all behind?" (She had perfected for theatrical use the best and loudest stage whisper in the U.A.A. As a young person, I was frequently mortified by it in public at weddings, funerals, and graduations, cowering at her accomplishment.) We were alone, but the future possibilities of a visit from china-painting relatives could not be overlooked. The whisper was resonant with conscience. The aunt and cousin, two compulsive craftswomen from whose fingers a thousand wild roses, Parma violets, pure lilies, and many a twining species much evolved through hybridizing with gold scallops flowed and flowed upon Limoges, were thus placated, and their dreadful dainty works went West to a dark shelf.

In Berkeley there were few preparations against the cold, and none in our house except a fireplace. My mother installed a newly invented and nearly unvented gas wall heater, which, reliable exterminator though it should have been, failed to asphyxiate us. As it made a vile odor and gave a miserly and clammy warmth, we depended mainly on coal-oil stoves for heat. These were unique substitutes for household warmth, promising much but requiring faith as well as fuel. They operated like old-fashioned lamps, the oil being contained in a large can with a wick, while the flue, instead of being glass, was metal and radiated a feeble heat. About three feet high, they could be warily transported by means of a bail. They rested on ornate bases. These heaters we used upstairs, and the supply of coal oil was kept in a ten-gallon can in a storeroom under the eaves. My mother regarded the entire arrangement as very dangerous. It may well have been. In any case, we frequently spent our days blue with cold and left the stoves unlighted. Even unlighted, they stirred my mother's suspicions, and the ten-gallon can with its inflammable contents caused her real anxiety, especially in warm weather when the sun beat on the roof close above.

***

THE SEVENTEENTH OF September was a hot, dry day. At midmorning, the wind blew heavily from inland, the air was too clear, in exaggerated visibility, for the eye's comfort, while the big tea-colored hills of Berkeley appeared about to rise and float. My mother was busy pouring boiling water down an ant hole in the front yard. We thought the ants were disturbed by the weather. Perhaps it was premonition that had sent them streaming up. I think I was upset by my mother's good-housekeeping deed. Still, the ants were too large -- they were enormous -- and once inside the house and in the white sugar they would be even blacker, larger.

It was between noon and one o'clock that we became aware of the scent of smoke coming from the eucalyptus groves on the hills above us. Burning eucalyptus makes itself known long before it is seen. We went into the house, leaving the ants to their scrambling and rushing, but soon came out to try the air again. The odor was stronger now and the smoke was visible. Then more and more visible. At first, we watched it as something that could have nothing to do with us. Next, we became curious. There was a fire station not far away around the corner on Buena Vista Way -- a fire station to which my mother had referred lightly, even facetiously, when purchasing her home, as warrant against danger should there ever be a fire. Almost out of protective superstition, as if to say that loss should not be challenged, she carried a very low insurance. As the smoke increased, we decided to make inquiries. I walked around the corner to the Buena Vista station. It was empty, both of men and of equipment. The smoke was now thick, the odor also. Yet even in our growing surprise, such was our lack of sense that we were not impressed by the threat of danger. We were living in a city. In a city we must be safe from the violence of nature. "If anything is wrong," said my mother, with a typical respect for official procedure, "we would certainly be informed." She continued to apply water from the kitchen teakettle down the ant hole. Whatever warning might have been sent out later, our own neighborhood received no notice other than the sight of smoke and the hot smell of burning eucalyptus that a major brushfire was descending on us with vicious speed.

I cannot remember why I was at home instead of attending some of my classes, as I cannot, after so many years, remember how long it was before we seriously took alarm and gave in to the nervousness that had begun to overwhelm us. Less than an hour. "Mother," I said, "why don't we stop pouring water down the ant hole and pour a little on the house?" At this naive suggestion, my mother ran to the garden hose and turned it on. A weak trickle came from the nozzle. Was everyone else wringing water from his hose? Was everyone else hit by the same fright that had just hit us? Toward the hilltop we could see the smoke darkening. "But really it's a long way off," I said, and wondered how, if that were true, it could look so near. And now the old established patterns of mind began to work in my mother under the pressure that had seized her. Her origins took over. Her years of worldliness had weakened but not broken the link in her Quaker inheritance. Conscience was what my mother had been upheld by or held together by or afflicted by. In my childhood, I was aware of tension, a sprain, a sore spot in her being -- a spiritual location in which this noble and bothersome element in her life made itself too large for ease and could not be reduced or soothed. As the fire gathered above us, my mother's Quaker conscience became sharp and authoritative. She seized the water hose once again, but no water at all came from it. "Of course nothing will happen," she said in a shaking voice. "But if anything should happen I don't want my house to endanger the houses around us." Just then a fire engine thundered past our house. Its bright color and its sound were terrifying. She dropped the hose. "That can of coal oil!" she cried.

My mother's nerves exploded into disorder that had only one purpose -- to get the ten gallons of coal oil out of the house and into the middle of the large vacant lot, where it would not be a menace to our next-door neighbor. By now we were convinced that although we would not say, "The fire is coming," we must act as though it was almost there. The man who sold coal oil had always carried the can upstairs, and it was awkward and unwieldy. Stumbling in fear and haste, together Mother and I thumped and urged it down the stairs, then down the porch steps, and dragged it between us into the middle of the vacant lot. For fifty years, how bitterly I have wished that we had used the precious time in saving a few objects that were dear to us. But the act of saving personal treasures was beyond us. It was as if they were already destroyed, rising in particles on the wind. The struggle between certainty and disbelief in the possibility of disaster was so intense that our minds were suddenly empty of meaning or judgment -- hysterically empty. We did not believe in what we were doing but did it fanatically. At the same time we had no feeling that we were real. We had no dimensions -- only articulated fear that lifted us up the stairs once more. We dressed with quick, chilly hands to leave the house. I had a pair of new red slippers and a new dress just back from the dressmaker, a silk crepe with faggoted seams. These lay on the bed, and I got into them in frantic haste. Then I shoved a black straw hat on my head. For a desperate, magnified moment I looked around my bedroom. "Don't burn!" I begged the old spool bed and the pretty little sewing table. For a few endless seconds I filled my eyes with things I loved. "Don't burn!" I cried. "Don't burn!"

***

As WE LEFT the house, the wind blew my hat away and carried it out of sight. This was the fire's own wind, hated and feared by firefighters. It had taken my hat like a large cocoon. We waited in frenzy for the little streetcar and became convinced that it was not running. My mother hailed two boys in an automobile heading downhill, who took us to the bank on Shattuck Avenue -- a trip of not more than ten minutes -- and from there she called the next-door neighbor and asked for news.

"Your house is on fire!" the woman screamed. "Let me go! Let me get my silver! Goodbye! Goodbye!" I have always wondered what did she do with the telephone receiver at that moment. Replace it, drop it, throw it? Did she save her silver? Was hers as nice as my mother's?

We both sank down on a bench and tried to realize what was happening to us. Then we walked to the door of the bank and looked up at the increasing smoke. Only smoke. No flames could as yet be seen. Up there, hidden in turmoil and destruction, our home was burning. Up there, deep in smoke and terrible heat, our home was being consumed, and only just now we had walked out the front door and in no time at all the house was burning and all our possessions were burning and the smoke rose thickly in huge malign puffs.

The bank doorman stood with us, looking up. "I guess the whole town will go," he said.

The insane speed of our departure, and the insane speed of the developing fire, and the insane unreality of being witness to the holocaust made the few words sound lucid, even sensible, in the midst of delirium.

"I guess it surely will," he repeated.

We stood at the door, looking and looking, somberly, quietly. "What caused it?" we finally asked.

"A power line blew down and started a grass fire. Back in Wildcat Canyon."

"That doesn't sound like much," my mother said ignorantly.

"Not much to begin with," he answered, watching the rolling smoke steadily, "but by now it's what you can see -- only a lot more than you can see."

My mother had snatched up some kind of document before we left the house, perhaps her nearly useless insurance policy, and methodically she went to the safe-deposit vault and put it away. Next she cashed a check. "I think we will go to San Francisco," she said, and we walked somehow to the nearby electric train, which took us to the ferry to cross the bay. We were silent and composed. Rather, we were stupefied, without any plan or ability to think, and the words of the doorman sounded like advice and we took it. We left the burning town.

Then, on the ferry, the enormity of what was happening really became visible. We sat on the deck and saw the city of Berkeley literally going up in hot, black clouds, wildfire covering the hills with a writhing mass of flame. How could we believe what we were seeing? No sight of excess in nature can be more terrible, even at a distance, than the rolling and wallowing and climbing and pitching of fire in the wind. We sat hypnotized as the ferry churned ahead.

Suddenly my mother stiffened. Her hands clenched in her lap. Her face turned quite gray. "That's not just a grass fire!" she cried. "That's not just a forest fire!" Then she moaned. "The can of coal oil! A spark ... A stray flame ...The oil exploded.... It spread the fire!" I thought she was going to faint. "I did it!" she managed to say. "I have destroyed the city of Berkeley! I shall be called to justice! People are dying up there! How many people are dying!" Like the hills, her conscience was enflamed, and the outpouring of her suffering went on and on. This was not theatrical grief, not the extremities of the classics before the falling walls of Euripides; she was watching her own fire and the extinction of an American city. No Siddons, no Duse ever spoke the awful truth from such horrors of an agonized heart. As I listened to her repeated self-accusation, it gradually and painfully became clear to me that she was right. Fire of such immensity, rage, and velocity could not possibly be descending on the city and destroying it without having been fed by a cache of fuel, an explosion in dry grass, and hot wind. That can of coal oil!

***

My POOR MOTHER -- my poor beautiful, pitiful mother. Not only to have lost her home and all her possessions but to be the cause of such loss and tragedy to others. Here she was, in this excruciating predicament, alone with me, my father dead, my sisters gone to their own lives and careers, and how could I save her? The depth of her desperation flowed up and into me. What happened to me personally and psychologically there on the deck of the ferry as Berkeley burned in front of us has never ceased to astonish me. What I did I could not normally have done of myself. In my family I was never an initiator, a rebel; I only followed and sat with decorum where I was set down, lamentably biddable, and a sweet, true comfort to my mother. Now in the moment of her desolate need I turned against her. I did not turn against her: some anxious oracle used me for a short angry span of words, a cry of freedom. In a rush of foreknowledge, I knew that for the rest of her life my presence and devotion would be necessary, that I would be left unaided with her, a torn partaker of regret and remorse. As my mother continued to accuse herself, I shouted, "Stop it! Stop it! It's unbearable! Be quiet! If you can't be quiet, I'll jump over the railing into the bay!" And I stood up.

Her stricken silence and the look of reproach and loneliness she gave me were dreadful. I could not make myself touch her to console her. I could not apologize. Now I sat in misery -- in a brimming vat of it, awash in it, sick in it -- until at last we came to the dock.

Lying awake that night in some modest hotel in San Francisco, trying to hear whether my mother was asleep or stretched out in torment of mind, I thought with sharp longing of the possessions we had lost, the amiable furnishings of home -- the chairs whose arms had held our own, the mirrors whose faces were ours, the rugs whose Turkish and Persian patterns our feet knew as well as our eyes did. I thought of my small bedroom, with its old spool bed and the woven coverlet dated 1863 among the flowers of the border, the cherrywood dresser made by a Quaker great-uncle. I laid my hand on the lamp table and the quaint sewing box that was like a little fort, with brass-rimmed holes for the thread to come out from the spools. I wandered about the house, from this dear thing to that, and in my mother's room I leaned, as I so often had done, against the tall post of her New Orleans bed. From room to room I went in love and loss, touching, looking, feeling with sad, bitter attention the objects that had been common to our daily lives. Suddenly I remembered the gold thimble I had left on the windowsill near some embrodiery. It had been the gift of Aunty Goodall. I ran, and there it was, just where I left it. Then with a pang I remembered the apricot silk-taffeta dress I wore in the wedding of my friend Eleanor. I stumbled up the stairs and found it hanging safe in the closet. Then I burst into sobs.

"Oh, I left you all in the house alone, alone as the fire came. I turned my back and left you to perish. Goodbye, goodbye," I mourned into my wet pillow, and finally fell asleep.

THE NEXT MORNING, we returned to Berkeley and found the hill under state military guard. As residents, we obtained permits and began the climb through snowy ashes up to what had been our home, up to find the evidence of my mother's guilt. Of this we had not spoken since the trip on the ferry, although it lay tightly, heavily fixed in our two minds. We had bought no newspaper, asked no questions. We knew enough -- too much -- and were afraid to learn more. As we started up the hill, ash dominated the landscape. The fury of the fire had consumed the homes of sixty city blocks right down to the foundations, leaving only an occasional fireplace with its gnawed chimney standing, or a scattering of twisted pipes. Trees and shrubs showed wretchedly as black fragments. It was a scene of littered woe, of the destruction of human satisfactions and roots, and it suggested abominably the sweat, the labor, the heartbreak of restoration.

There was no wind now, and the whiteness on the ground lay still. As we climbed, we met a few people who were wandering up like ourselves. The atmosphere was quiet, haggard, and in a way dreamlike. Yesterday was as unreal as the ashes I stopped at intervals to shake from my red slippers. If I looked about me long enough, hard enough, would I not summon out of the ashes that brown house with its huge bush of blue hydrangeas in front, each cyme of flowers an enormous display of congested chemical color? And on farther, a half block, a vague species of Queen Anne architecture with an unpainted porch that resembled a skull. I stopped again for a long look. "Are you tired?" my mother asked. "Come along." Poor Mother -- was she eager to face the proof of guilt?

We met a boy I knew at the university. Yesterday, the students had been dismissed to work as firefighters or to save the contents of homes, many the homes of professors -- dwellings stored with fine libraries and manuscripts of importance. We were wading through ashes of scholarship and literature. The boy carried a large album. "I picked up an old lady yesterday," he said. "She was all by herself and in a daze, and she was hanging on to this photo album like a bulldog. She let me carry it, though, and I got her down La Loma Steps, and suddenly someone ran down behind us and yelled, 'Thank God, here's Grandmother!' But when I tried to give her back the album, she wouldn't take it. 'It's your family,' I kept saying. 'No indeed, not mine,' she said. 'I never saw them before.' And her grandson went off with her." My friend opened the album and held it out as if he hoped I might relieve him of it. I turned a few pages of whiskers and pop-eyed brides and yellowing babies.

"Not mine, either," I said. "I never saw them before."

"Oh. Did you lose everything?"

"Everything."

He squeezed his eyes shut and gave a whistle of sympathy. "One horrible day," he said. Then he propped the album against a pile of tumbled bricks. "I'm getting tired of these old folks myself," he remarked, and sauntered on.

Next, we met a neighbor who had kept a large aviary. He inquired wistfully whether we had seen any canaries. When he realized that the fire was coming, he told us, he had gone into the cage and, as was their custom, the birds all came to him and perched on him -- his shoulders, arms, and head. And he had walked out with them -- how pretty, how pitiful it must have been -- and then run, going as far as he could get from the fire and the wind. At last, they had flown. "Please listen," he said sadly, and disappeared on the bleak, untwittering hill rather as though he himself had flown.

"Did you see that man?" I asked my mother.

"Come," my mother said. "We must hurry."

But then we were overtaken by a fireman in his uniform. He told us the fire was the fastest on record, destroying the sixty city blocks, with six hundred homes, fraternity houses, and one fire station, in two hours, between two o'clock and four o'clock. He was still greatly excited. "Houses simply burst," he said. "I saw one across the street simply burst into flames because it was so dry."

My mother was trying to ask a question. "Was anyone ... How many... ?"

"My mother wants to ask how many people were burned to death." Feeling crude, I asked it for her quickly.

"Not one," the fireman answered -- or, rather, he boomed it out over the empty hill. "Not one soul. Even me. One way or another, I didn't die from heart failure. But if it had been at night ... Oh, God!" and he continued toward the ashes of the station, where yesterday I had looked for him in vain.

My mother drew a deep, noisy breath, a sick-sounding groan of gratitude, and I realized that I had not been aware of her breathing as we climbed the hill. Now I felt that I weighed less, and it was easier to lift my feet. "Broad daylight," I said. "We should have thought about that." No response; only deep, grateful breathing.

As we continued on our way, we came upon the grinning keyboard of a grand piano; it lay there in the ashes, an obscene fragment. Had the agitated owner got it as far as the sidewalk before all the music in it ignited in a final lurid crescendo? Not much farther and I picked up a charred patch of Paisley wool. The design of black and brown and turquoise looked familiar. My mother took it, turned it about, and held it possessively. "Yes, that was my mother's -- all that's left of her big shawl -- and it blew downhill this far. How strange that you found it." She turned it over and over. (I still have the bag she made after she had washed it free of the smell of burned wool and combined it with duvetyn and a tortoise shell handle. It was meant to look elegant, and in an elegiac way it does -- a kind of ladylike pouch.)

Another block and we were at the corner of Buena Vista. We stopped a moment to rest, as we had been stopping all the way along, though not really to rest -- rather, in the midst of saying "Hurry," a means of delaying for a few minutes more the sight of that final thing whose dread magnetism had drawn us all night and all morning. Of the episode on the ferry there had been no mention. I still could not bring myself to say that I was sorry, and my mother's suffering discouraged any communication.

***

A FEW HUNDRED feet more and we had come home. Now the ashes were real. The pepper trees had been reduced to stubs. The concrete steps, heaped with ashes, led us up to more ashes, into which the chimney had collapsed. We stood and faced in silence the flat nihilism of total loss. The satanic energy of the fire had swept the premises of human meaning, and how could one feel any relationship to a void of ashes? Identical emptiness of ash lay at our neighbor's property and in every direction. A crazy place; it would be easy to go crazy standing there.

Gradually we became aware of details -- the few there were. Twisted pipes where the kitchen had been, and nearby the garbage container that had stood outside the back door. It was in fair condition, its garbage thoroughly cooked by the heat of the burning house. We picked our way through the ashes and, attracted by a spot of color, I gathered up a shard of china. I was looking into the steady, perennial eye of one of my aunt's handpainted violets. With an instinctive reaction of irony, I dropped it and stepped on it. "Just you!" I said angrily. "Two barrels and two thousand miles, and you are all we have left of anything. Anything at all." Under my foot I felt them moving, squirming, trying to reassemble -- six dozen tiny salt cups, a large vase painted with well-clothed Congregational nymphs, and that uncanny thing a Pompeian lemonade pitcher. "Stay where you are," I commanded them dizzily, and at that moment I heard my mother's voice ringing out: "I found it, I found my silver!" I ran to see. To see what? The mahogany buffet with the long drawer full of neatly arranged spoons, forks, knives, and serving pieces? She was standing beside a bright lump of shapeless metal: her melted silver. I gazed at it fixedly and felt myself growing more and more stupefied. Perhaps the large, crumpled spider I stepped into brought back a little sense, for I had to concentrate on it. "And what do you suppose this is?" We answered together, "The typewriter."

We could identify nothing else, and now it was no longer possible to avoid going toward what we had come to see. Side by side, we started across the one-hundred-foot stretch of what had been the vacant lot next door, silent and glancing up at the hills instead of straight ahead. But what use to evade? If we had the strength to walk, we must walk it. Suddenly, as though it had risen from the earth, the coal-oil can, half obliterated by ashes, stood in front of us. We went to it quickly. It appeared to be quite sound. This could not be believed without proof. My mother touched it, first with the toe of her shoe, then with her finger. I touched it also. We stood and regarded it, motionless as the can itself. We could not speak, and out of respect for the supernatural I had the idiotic impulse to address it in some way: "O Thou! O mysterious containment!" It had remained in one piece. It had not cast its fuel around to feed the holocaust. My mother moved carefully and grasped the handle of the can on one side. I took the other and we lifted it a little off the ground. It was heavy, as it had been heavy yesterday. We let the can come to rest, very gently. Next my mother unscrewed the cap. We took turns peering in. Then we smelled it. There was no twig or stick to thrust in to obtain a drop to smell more closely, so we spilled a bit and I rubbed my right forefinger in the moisture and again we smelled it. We smelled it with joy, or something as near to joy as we were capable of that day; we smelled it in a passion of relief, in delight, as if it had been lilies of the valley. There was not the least morsel or shred of doubt. It was coal oil. It was my mother's coal oil. It was exactly what we had left sitting there the day before.

We hunted about excitedly, intent on anything that might provide a clue to the miracle. Ashes and patches of bare ground where the wind had swept everything before it -- nothing else. The grass had been tall and very dry, but the fastest fire on record had gone by in such speed that there had been no time for the contents of the can to become heated. This benign truth struck us like a strong blow. I felt like falling, and there was nothing to support me. My mother's reaction was better. Here where only yesterday the fire and the wind had met in superlative fury she drew herself up with the same gesture I had often seen when she was about to pick up an important cue. In her melodious voice, simply and fervently, she said, "Thank you, Lord."

It was a notable performance. No one of the famous women she idolized, not even the exotic Alia Nazimova, could have done it better. They would all have been acting. She was not. It was drama, but the drama of truth uncontrived, and in it life and art met and no one could have told the difference. Fifty-one years have passed, and I can see her standing and giving thanks in the midst of ashes, forgetting her own losses and woes and giving thanks for a clean conscience. The moment was whole, it held only gratitude, and if she swayed slightly it was the poise of talent that swayed with her, the movement like a reed, fast at the earth but free to bend, to bend memorably at the touch of great feeling.

I helped my mother as she tipped the can and let the oil run out. It disappeared at once down a wide crack in the dry earth -- ten gallons of coal oil, ten gallons of thankful tears. I followed her as she walked across the vacant lot to take possession of the ashes of her home.

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