A Time Between

By Shirley Streshinsky

Ambitious and determined, Hallie Duer craves to be at the center of her epoch—with Prohibition and bootleg gin, Model Ts and moving pictures, Red roundups and the routine lynching of Negroes. The old order is in upheaval, and the emerging new order is at last allowing extraordinary women their long-deserved place in the sun.
    In this uncommon love story, Hallie, a consummate observer by profession, learns to become a passionate participant when she falls in love with a dynamic Irish lawyer, who is married but separated from his wife. The course of their involvement is complicated by Catholic convention and a secret from the past. Cool-headed, self-possessed Hallie experiences an all-consuming love, but pain, disappointment, and forgiveness are part of that passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781620455173

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT IS IMPORTANT to begin by thanking Diane Reverand, the editor of this book, who from the very beginning was excited about San Francisco in the 1920s and the extraordinary women who were part of that time and place. Diane's own extraordinary skills have been mainstays in the writing of this book.

     I want also to thank two veteran San Francisco newspapermen who were especially generous with their time, and who shared their memories of San Francisco in the 1920s with me. Eugene Block began his newspaper career in 1908 and served as city editor under the legendary Fremont Older. Stuart Rasmussen, librarian at the San Francisco Examiner, was a young man in the 1920s, but his memory of the era is keen.

     Several very good friends must be thanked: newsman Ben Bagdikian, long a Washington correspondent and now professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; David Johnston, reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and his wife, photographer Janet Fries, who went to the fights with me; San Francisco lawyers Ken Jones and John Vlahos; Ingrid and Ralph Schultheis, who always do whatever needs doing; and Marge and Leon Markel, longtime San Franciscans who charmed me with their stories. I need also to thank my brother, Harry Gaghen, who helped me with the Montana research, and my cousin, Joyce Eastin, who made my Sacramento probings so much easier.

     The librarians in the newspaper room at the Oakland Public Library were particularly helpful, as were those who staff the San Francisco Historical Society and the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. The librarians at the Kensington Public Library deserve a special round of applause.

     Two who did library time with me are Mark and Maria Streshinsky, and their father was my coconspirator in all of this. I cannot thank those three enough.

When a work of fiction includes historical material, as this one does, the reader is often hard put to separate fact from fiction. To ease this dilemma, I would like to say that while all of the major characters in this book are fictional, two were suggested by real people: Sanford Curtin, by San Francisco editor Fremont Older, and Agnes Marchant, by an Oakland woman named Anita Whitney. Even so, only the most general outlines of their lives coincide with my characters'. Curtin and Marchant are inventions.

     Real historical figures do appear in this book, and occasionally they do make speeches. Whenever that happens, I have tried always to make them speak in character. For example, Alice Roosevelt Longworth is quoted as having called President Harding a slob.

     One historical error is purposeful. The movie Greed was filmed in 1921, not 1923 as I have it here. If there are other errors, they are mine.

     Shirley Streshinsky

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For Ted

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It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.

—Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920's

In the meantime

In between time

Ain't we got fun?

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PROLOGUE

San Francisco

November 11, 1927

ODD MEMORIES and random shards of conversation work their way into my thoughts in the early hours of morning. I wake at four or at five, too excited to sleep. It has been this way for weeks.

     This morning something Faith said in passing kept at me. Provoked, I suppose, by someone she was photographing, she had complained, People don't listen. They become so absorbed in what they have to say that they never hear what you are telling them.

     She is right. People don't listen. I didn't listen. I heard the words but not the silences between them. I missed the important inflections, the small hesitations, the peripheral details. I missed the nuances where the truth so often hides.

     I should have heard but I didn't.

     Today is Armistice Day. The war ended nine years ago. There will be a parade down Market Street. There will be bunting and flags flying and veterans marching in uniform, the wide hats and the winding puttees. There will be speeches about the Great War and how the Yanks came and how they stayed until it was over, over there.

     As if it were over. As if we weren't a generation crippled, in one way or another, by the war.

     Too restless to sleep, I pace about my flat, exhilarated by the prospect of a new day. I want to hurry the sun, to lift it from behind the East Bay hills. I tread lightly, not to disturb those sleeping in the flat below. Yet wanting them to be up, to be alive with me, to get on with the day.

     We are to sail on the Ile de France. First to the American cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. A pilgrimage, an end to old sorrows. Then on to Paris for an interview with Aristide Briand, the minister of foreign affairs. And to Germany with a letter of introduction to Hermann Muller, who will be the Chancellor if the Socialists win in the May elections. Europe is in economic chaos; France has devalued the franc; Hindenburg has repudiated Germany's responsibility for the War; there is so much to understand before I can write with any authority.

     I am to be special correspondent for six West Coast newspapers, including my own, the San Francisco Times. To mark the tenth anniversary of the war, I have been assigned to travel through Europe to talk to the people and their leaders, and to write about what is happening and try to predict what lies ahead. The American people want to be reassured that there will never be another war, the Boss told me. We hope you will be able to give those assurances.

     I pick up a fossilized sand dollar from the table near my bed and hold it in the palm of my hand. The photograph I keep next to it was taken the day Agnes found the fossil and gave it to me. It is not a posed picture. My brother and I had walked down the beach together and had paused, locked in conversation, leaning into the wind with the ocean stretched to infinity behind us, his head bent to mine. Faith made that photograph the first time we went to Willow Camp together—Agnes and Sara, Clive and Faith. And Riordan. October, 1921. To celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday and Agnes's fifty-first. Before. I am like those San Franciscans who define time in terms of before or after the 1906 quake, which must have created some intrinsic division in their lives.

     I study the fossil and the photograph, both frozen in time. I look out of my kitchen window and see that the sun is lighting the fingers of fog that have drifted from the Bay into the deep recesses of the city. The floorboards of the Victorian flat creak, as if to signal some diurnal change.

     Right now, Lennie, the newsboy who has a stand on the corner of Fifth and Mission, will be waiting for the first edition. Lennie, who isn't a boy at all, though he was when his legs were blown off at Chateau-Thierry.

     Lennie won't be marching in the parade today.

     Nor will Riordan.

     On my way to work I will stop at the Laurel Hill Cemetery to take flowers to Babe, who fell in another war.

     Strange, how one circle closes just as another, wider circle opens. When I spoke to Faith of the war and of circles closing, she said that perhaps they weren't circles at all, but only seemed so if viewed from above, or in hindsight. If we look at them from another angle, she suggested, they might prove to be spirals, ever rising, ever widening.

     I said I found that to be a frightening prospect—no circle ever closing, no war to end all wars. And she said that maybe all we could ever be certain of was movement, and change.

     I think now that she is right about that, too.

     There are times when, late in the afternoon before the fog rolls back through the Golden Gate, a luminous yellow light catches, permeates, holds. For the time that it lasts, which is not long, the whole world is bathed in radiant light. I saw it for the first time not long after I arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1920. It seemed to me to be an illusion, too beautiful to be real. I did not know, then, what it was to be real.

     I know now that nothing was as it seemed. Perhaps nothing ever is. What I must do is go back, thread through all that has happened, make translations of a sort—in light of what I know now that I did not know then. Now and then. Before and after. Circles and spirals.

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TWO

MY FIRST JOB was as secretary and office manager of the Amador County News, a weekly serving the little communities huddled into the foothills of the Sierra. Within a month of my arrival, one of the paper's two reporters left without notice and I was allowed to do his work so long as I finished my office chores and didn't require any additional pay. I accepted gladly, asking only that my name appear on the front-page stories I wrote.

     Lucky for me, the other reporter was a good editor. I would turn in my copy, study what he did with it, and after a while I learned how to put a newspaper story together.

     At first I traveled the dirt back roads by horseback. When the state began to build hard roads, I asked Grandfather to lend me the money to buy a Model T.

     Never thought to see you here, Henry, Abe Peterson, who sold farm machinery and Fords and was hard of hearing, shouted at Grandfather, who objected to noise of any sort.

     It's for my grandgirl here, Grandfather answered, refusing to raise his voice.

     Abe heard. Ain't she kinda small for this thing? he bellowed. Turning to me he added, No offense, honey, but I doubt you can handle—

     Don't doubt it, Abe, Grandfather interrupted. Now, if you'll just show her how to run that machine and give her one of those licenses, we won't take any more of your time.

     It took me all of that day to learn to set the spark and throttle levers, grab hard onto the crank and slip my finger through the loop that controls the choke, then pull the loop with a mighty tug until the engine roared to life.

     I've got it, I would shout to Grandmother, who stood watching from the porch. Then I jumped onto the running board to move the spark and throttle to the proper position and, if all went well, I could crawl into the driver's seat, release the hand brake and shove my foot against the low speed pedal. I lurched off, down the lane, whooping . . . a surge of excitement rising in me . . . I was commanding this machine . . . I released my left foot and felt the Ford careen into high gear.

     I'm flying! I called back to Grandmother, who by then had her apron over her head, sure that I would crash.

     There were plenty of Model T's on Sacramento streets. A few of the boys who had graduated with me had them by now, but I never failed to make heads turn when I drove into town.

     I figured it was true! Billy Homans, who had been in my class, shouted out to me on I Street one day. When somebody told me Hallie got herself a T, I said, 'She surely would!'

     Clive wrote, When Grandmother saw the photo of you beside your Model T she said, 'Hallie looks like a flower, but it seems to me she's as tough as a weed.'

     Whenever I rumbled down back country roads where motorcars didn't often stray, farm folks would come out to look. More than once I had to ask an obliging farmer to bring his team to pull me out of a ditch or mudhole.

     I traveled those back roads for three years, getting to know the towns and the people who lived in them. I wrote about their troubles and I wrote about their joys. I learned to listen, not only to what they said, but to pick up what they weren't saying. I wrote about the night the Erlfelds' house burned to the ground, and how the family was taken in by neighbors and fed and clothed until a new house could be built for them. I wrote about the child who fell down the old Jupiter mine shaft and how he was pulled out after thirteen long, cold hours. (That story came close to costing me some frostbitten toes.) By the time I had published enough stories to go looking for a bigger paper, it was 1916 and we were at war. An American expeditionary force had left for France, several of the Sacramento Union reporters in its ranks.

     I was twenty-two when I went to work at the Union, but I told them I was twenty-five. (I looked sixteen.) My first assignment, to my chagrin, was on the women's page, where I was to write household hints and social notes.

     The war came to us over the wire services, the Associated Press machine clicking out the strange-sounding names . . . Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Belleau Wood, the Meuse-Argonne offense . . . Soon enough the casualty lists came clicking over the wires. We would watch, in silence, as the names of local boys were transcribed. Then a picture would be collected and run in the paper edged in black: a solemn-faced boy in the stiff-collared uniform, dead in France.

     I followed the war news, spent as much time as I could learning how to cover the political news that came out of the state capital, and tried to resign myself to be content with the few stories I was allowed to cover—a school-board meeting or an interview with the owner of a department store about his new sign.

     I started going out to the Hamlin track on Sunday afternoons. Billy Homans and some of the other Model T owners in town had taken to racing their machines on a makeshift track. Naturally, the boys taunted me to join them. And naturally, after a while, I had to give it a try. To my surprise, I liked it. To their surprise, I was good enough to make most of them eat my dust. When one of the editors heard about it, he had me do the motoring news that appeared in the Sunday paper.

     Then it was 1918 and the war was over. The boys paraded down Fifth Avenue in New York in their tunics and Sam Browne belts, and down K Street in Sacramento, where they were cheered by the Daughters of the Golden West and the survivors from the Old Soldiers' Home, their frail bodies pulled to attention. Bands played Over There and car horns sounded and school children, let out for the day, straggled alongside the marching men, oblivious of anything but the excitement of the flag-waving, drumrolling march.

     The uniforms were packed in camphor and stored in tin trunks in a far corner of the barn loft, and the boys who had gone to France came back to the farm or got jobs in town selling tractors or insurance or Chevrolets, or they did nothing at all. There was an awful silence then, as quiet and as thick as the tule fog that lay close over the valley that winter.

     People listened politely as President Wilson talked about a League of Nations, but it was over. They knew there was trouble in the land—trouble with Bolsheviks and anarchists and the colored and the Jews. But the war was over, and most of the good people of the Sacramento Valley turned their attention to other things.

     Radios. And aeroplanes. Moving pictures and motorcars and boxing matches. The world was changing; the war was won and now it was time to look ahead.

     Only one Union reporter returned to the paper, so I was told I could stay on. He came back to the City Hall beat I had been coveting. I couldn't complain. Still, a steady diet of recipes and wedding stories was not enough to sustain me. I hungered for more substantial fare. I tried to remember how Annie Farrell had made me feel that day, five years before, in the courthouse . . . I began to see how foolish I had been, to think I could do what Annie was doing. I couldn't even move onto the front page of the Sacramento Union. . . .

I walked over to the courthouse and sat alone in the big room where the trial had been. It was steamy hot; a fan was whirring somewhere in the building. The windows were open and I could hear the soft clacking of a palm tree outside as the fronds brushed against each other in the warm breeze. I tried to think of Annie, but my mind kept wandering. I brushed away a horsefly, sailing in great lazy loops around me, when it came too close.

     My mind wandered to a story that had appeared in the paper that day, about a couple out on Route 4 whose boy had died of pneumonia. The child was ten years old and so badly retarded he could scarcely walk or talk. He had become sick and, according to the story, his parents had chosen to let him die. They admitted it to the doctor who signed the death certificate. There was some talk of prosecution. Child neglect was mentioned.

     Something about that story troubled me. After work that day I drove out to the farm to talk to the parents of the dead boy. I found the mother in the kitchen; she looked worn, the way a lot of farm women do who have been worked too hard. And she was older than I had expected her to be. At first she made small, unfinished gestures with her hands, as if she didn't know where to start. You could see the hurt in her eyes. She brought me a glass of lemonade and we sat on the front porch. I plucked a blowing cotton-wood plume from the air. She smiled and said, Billy used to like me to catch them for him. Then she started talking about her boy, talking as if she could say what she had been wanting to say all along, had there been anyone to listen.

     He never was right, you know, she told me, not from his first poor breath. Her voice was soft and sad, and as worn as the faded handkerchief she twisted. It got harder for him, the older he got. You could see the little fella trying, struggling to do something he just never was going to be able to do. And it got harder for us too. He was our late child . . . we didn't expect him, after raisin' up three grown boys and all, but we took him as God's grace.

     She stopped and pushed her fingertips into her eyes as if to stop the flow of tears. After a moment she went on, Last year my man got sick, real sick. And he could see how hard it was, me taking care of him and the boy, too. Billy was getting too big for me. And his pa, well . . . his pa said to him, 'Sonny, how's your ma to get on when I'm gone?' Being sick scared him so, don't you see? Well, the boy didn't know what he meant, but I did. And that's when we figured what we had to do. We said the next time the boy took sick, we wouldn't try to keep him. We'd just let him go while we were both here to help. And, God willing, he'd go without pain and suffering.

     She stopped then, gazing out over the farmyard, not seeing. I waited. Finally she went on, with a small wave of her hand, as if to stir the heavy air. That's what happened, she said with a sigh. "He took sick