Today's Reading
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The day I turned seven years old, April 14, 1873, my mother, Molly Walsh, dressed me in my Sunday best and brought me to Union Square to have my portrait taken. The only existing photograph of my childhood depicts me standing beside a harp with the terrified expression of a man on the gallows, a result of the long minutes spent staring into the black box of the camera, holding my breath, followed by the startle of the flashbulb. I should clarify that I do not know how to play any instrument; the harp was merely one of the dusty theatrical props crowded into the photography studio alongside cardboard columns, Chinese vases, and a stuffed horse.
The photographer was a small mustachioed Dutchman who had made a good living at his trade since the times of the gold rush when the miners came down from the mountains to deposit their nuggets in the banks and have their portraits taken to send home to their all-but-forgotten families. Gold fever soon died down, but San Francisco's upper-class patrons still frequented the studio to pose for posterity. My family didn't fall into that category, but my mother had her own reasons for wanting a photo of her daughter. She haggled on the price of the portrait, more on principle than out of real necessity; I've never known her to purchase anything without attempting to obtain a discount.
"While we're here, we'll go and see the head of Joaquín Murieta," she told me as we left the Dutchman's studio.
At the opposite end of the square, near the entrance to Chinatown, she bought me a cinnamon roll and led me to the door of an unsanitary tavern. We paid the entrance fee and traversed a long hallway to the rear of the locale. There, a scary thug lifted a heavy curtain and we entered a room hung with lugubrious draperies and lit with altar candles like some ghastly church. There was a table shrouded in black cloth at one end of the space and atop it sat two large glass jars. I cannot recall any further details of the décor because I was paralyzed by fright. My mother seemed euphoric even as I quaked with fear, both hands clutching at her skirts. The first jar held a human hand floating in a yellowish liquid. The second, a man's decapitated head with the eyelids sewn shut, lips pulled back, teeth barred, and hair standing on end.
"Joaquín Murieta was a bandit. A reprobate, like your father. This is how bandits usually end up," my mother explained.
It goes without saying that I suffered horrible nightmares that night. I was even feverish, but my mother was of the opinion that unless a person was bleeding, there was no need to intervene. The following day, wearing the same dress and the same cursed lace-up boots that pinched terribly, since I had been forcing my feet into them for the past two years, we picked up my portrait and walked to the wealthy part of town, a neighborhood I had never set foot in before. Cobbled streets wended their way up the hills flanked by stately homes overlooking rose gardens and tidily trimmed hedges, coach houses stocked with glossy horses, not a single beggar in sight.
Up to that point, my entire existence had transpired within the confines of the Mission District, that multicolored, polyglot multitude of emigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Italy; Mexicans who had always lived in California; and a considerable cohort of Chileans who came with the gold rush in 1848 and, several decades later, were still as poor as when they had first arrived. They never saw any gold. If they did find anything in the mines, it was snatched from them by the whites who arrived a year later. Many returned to their homeland with nothing more than fabulous tales to tell. Others stayed because the return trip was long and costly. The Mission District was bursting with factories, workshops, piles of rubbish, stray dogs, skinny mules, clotheslines, and doors thrown open wide because there was nothing of value to steal.
That pilgrimage with my mother to the restricted universe of the upper class was my first hint that we were poor. We were far from hungry and plagued by rodents, like my maternal grandparents in Ireland, but we led a modest lifestyle like everyone else around us, who lived hand to mouth. I had never paid any mind to people of greater means before because I had never had any contact with them. I had seen them from afar when I went downtown with my parents, but that seldom happened. The coaches pulled by lustrous horses; ladies in exaggerated Victorian fashions festooned with ruffles, fringe, and rosettes; gentlemen with their top hats and canes; and children dressed in sailor suits were creatures of another species. Our working-class neighborhood was filled with barefoot children, eternally pregnant women, and drunken men working odd jobs to scrape together enough money for bread. Compared to our neighbors, my small family was fortunate. My honorable stepfather always said that as long as we had work, love, and dignity, we should want for nothing. We also had a decent little home, and we were not indebted to anyone.
...
