It would take Dorothy Gale and her relatives three days to reach the mountains by train from Kansas, the conductor told them.
No matter what the schoolteacher had said about Galileo, Copernicus, and those other spoilsports, any cockamamie theory that the world was round remained refuted by the geometrical instrument of a rattling train applied to the spare facts of a prairie. Dorothy watched eagles and hawks careering too high to cast shadows, she watched the returning larks and bluebirds, and she wondered what they knew about the shape of the world, and if they would ever tell her.
Then the Rockies began to ice up along the spring horizon beyond the shoot-’em-up town of Denver. Uncle Henry had never seen such a sight. He declared himself bewilligered at their height. “They surely do remind me of the Great Kells of Oz,” agreed Dorothy, “though the Kells looked less bossy, somehow.” She tried to ignore the glance Uncle Henry shared with Aunt Em.
Some of the passes being snowed over, even in early April, the train made slower progress than the timetable had promised. Aunt Em fretted that their hotel room would be given away. Uncle Henry replied with an attempt at savoir faire. “I’ll wire ahead at the next opportunity, Em. Hush yourself and enjoy the nation.”
What a charade, that they were accustomed to taking fancified holidays. They had little extra money for emergencies, Dorothy knew. They were spending their savings.
The train chuffed along valleys noisy with rushing waters, inched across trestles as if testing them for purchase. It lollygagged up slopes. One cloudy afternoon it maneuvered through so many switchbacks that the travelers lost all notion of east and west. In her seat, Dorothy hummed a little. Once she thought she saw a castle on a ridge, but it was only a tricky rock formation.
“But I never before saw a rock that looked like a castle,” said Aunt Em brightly.
You never saw a castle, thought Dorothy, and tried not to be disappointed.
They worried their way through Nevada and its brownish springtime and at last came down into Californ-eye-ay through a napland of orchards and vineyards. When the train paused outside Sacramento to take on tinder, Dorothy saw a white peacock strutting along next to the tracks like a general surveying his troops. It paused at her window and fanned out its impossible stitchery. She could have sworn it was a White Peacock and that it would speak. But Toto began to yap out the open window, and the Bird kept its own counsel.
Finally the train shrugged and chuffed into San Francisco, a city so big and filthy and confounding that Uncle Henry dared to murmur, “This beats your old Emerald City, I’ll warrant.”
“Henry,” said his wife. “Pursed lips are kind lips.”
They found their hotel. The clerk was nice enough, a clean young man whose lips weren’t so much pursed as rubied. He forgave their delay but could no longer supply them with a room only one flight up, as they’d been promised. Aunt Em refused to try Mr. Otis’s hydraulic elevator so they had to climb five flights. They carried their own bags to avoid having to tip.
That night they ate Kaiser rolls they’d bought at the train station. All the next day they stayed in the hotel’s penitentially severe room, as Aunt Em recovered from the taxation to her nerves caused by the swaying of railway cars. She could not tolerate being left alone in a hotel chamber on their first day, not when it felt as if the whole building was rocking and bucking as the train had done.
Dorothy was eager to go and see what she could see, but they wouldn’t let her walk out alone. “A city is not a prairie,” Aunt Em proclaimed through the damp washcloth laid from forehead to chin. “No place for a compromised girl without a scrap of city wits.”
The spring air wafting through the open window next morning revived Aunt Em. All these flights up, it smelled of lilacs and hair oil and horse manure and hot sourdough loaves. Encouraged, the flatlanders ventured outdoors. Dorothy carried Toto in a wicker basket, for old times’ sake. They strolled up to the carriage entrance of the famous Palace Hotel and pretended they were waiting for a friend so they could catch a glimpse of sinful excess. What an accomplished offhand manner they showed, sneaking sideways glances through the open doors at the potted ferns, the swags of rust-red velvet drapery, the polished doorknobs. Also the glinting necklaces and earrings and cuff links, and gentlemen’s shirts starched so clean it hurt the eye to look. “Smart enough,” said Aunt Em, “for suchlike who feel the need to preen in public.” She was agog and dismissive at once, thought Dorothy, a considerable achievement for a plain-minded woman.
“The Palace Hotel is all very well,” said Dorothy at lunch—a frankfurter and a sumptuous orange from a stall near Union Square—“but the Palace of the Emperor in the Emerald City is just as grand—”
“I shall be ill.” Aunt Em, going pale. “I shall be ill, Dorothy, if after all we have mortgaged on this expedition you insist on seeing San Francisco by comparing it to some imagined otherworld. I shall be quite, quite ill.”
“I mean nothing by it,” said Dorothy. “Please, I’ll be still. It’s true I’ve never seen anything like most of this.”
“The world is wonderful enough without your having to invent an alternative,” said Uncle Henry. A tired man by now, not a well man either, and stretched to put things baldly while there was time. “Who is going to take you in marriage, Dorothy, if you’ve already given yourself over to delusions and visions?”
“Snares of the wicked one.” Aunt Em, spitting an orange seed into the street. “We have been kind, Dorothy, and we have been patient. We have sat silent and we have spoken out. You must put the corrupting nightmare of Oz behind you. Close it behind a door and never speak of it again. Or you will find yourself locked within it. Alone. We aren’t going to live forever, and you must learn to manage in the real world.”
“I should imagine I’m too young to be thinking of marriage.”
“You are already sixteen,” snapped her aunt. “I was married at seventeen.”
Uncle Henry’s eyes glinted merrily and he mouthed across his wife’s head at Dorothy: Too young.
Dorothy knew they had her best interests at heart. And it was true that since her delivery from Oz six years ago, she had proved a rare creature, a freak of nature. Her uncle and aunt didn’t know what to make of her. When she had appeared on the horizon, crossing the prairie by foot—shoeless but clutching Toto—long enough after Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s home had been carried away that they’d built themselves a replacement—her return was reckoned a statistical impossibility. Who rides the winds in a twister and lives to tell about it? Though Kansans set store on the notion of revelation, they are skeptical when asked to accept any whole-cloth gospel not measurable by brass tacks they’ve walloped into the dry goods counter themselves. So upon her return, Dorothy had been greeted not as a ghost or an angel, neither blessed by the Lord nor saved by a secret pact she must have made with the Evil One. Just tetched, concluded the good folks of the district. Tetched in the big fat head.
The local schoolchildren who had often before given Dorothy a wide berth now made irrevocable their policy of shunning her. They were unanimous but wordless about it. They were after all Christians.
She’d learned to keep Oz to herself, more or less; of course things slipped out. But she didn’t want to be figured as peculiar. She’d taken up singing on the way home from the schoolhouse as a way to disguise the fact that no one would walk with her. And now that she was done with school, it seemed there were no neighbors who might tolerate her company long enough to find her marriageable. So Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were making this last-ditch effort to prove that the workaday world of the Lord God Almighty was plenty rich and wonderful enough to satisfy Dorothy’s curiosity for marvels. She didn’t need to keep inventing impossible nonsense. She keeps on yammering about that fever dream of Oz and she’ll be an old spinster with no one to warble to but the bones of Toto.
They rode cable cars. “Nothing like these in all of Oz!” said Dorothy as the cars bit their way upslope, tooth by tooth, and then plunged down.
They went to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Dorothy had never seen the ocean before; nor had Uncle Henry or Aunt Em. The man who sold them hanks of fried fish wrapped in twists of newspaper remarked that this wasn’t the ocean, just the bay. To see the ocean they’d need to go farther west, to the Presidio, or to Golden Gate Park.
For its prettier name, they headed to Golden Gate Park. A policeman told them that when the long swell of greenery was being laid out, the city hadn’t yet expanded west past Divisadero Street, and anything beyond had been known by squatters and locals as the Outside Lands. “Oh?” said Dorothy, with brightening interest.
“That’s where you’ll find the ocean.”
They made their way to the edge of the continent first by carriage and then on foot, but the world’s edge proved disappointingly muffled in fog. The ocean was a sham. They could see no farther out into the supposed Pacific Ocean than they’d been able to look across the San Francisco Bay. And it was colder, a stiff wind tossing up briny air. The gulls keened, biblical prophets practicing jeremiad, knowing more than they would let on. Aunt Em caught a sniffle, so they couldn’t stay and wait to see if the fog would lift. The clammy saltiness disagreed with her—and she with it, she did declare.
That night, as Aunt Em was repairing to her bed, Uncle Henry wheedled from his wife a permission to take Dorothy out on the town. He hired a trap to bring Dorothy into a district called Chinatown. Dorothy wanted so badly to tell Uncle Henry that this is what it felt like to be in Oz—this otherness, this weird but convincing reality—that she bit a bruise in the side of her mouth, trying not to speak. Toto looked wary, as if the residents on doorsills were sizing him up to see how many Chinese relatives he might feed.
After a number of false starts, Uncle Henry located a restaurant where other God-fearing white people seemed comfortable entering, and a few were even safely leaving, which was a good sign. So they went inside.
A staid woman at a counter nodded at them. Her unmoving features looked carved in beef aspic. When she slipped off her stool to show Henry to a table, Dorothy saw that she was tiny. Tiny and stout and wrapped round with shiny red silk. She only came up to Dorothy’s lowest rib. To prevent her from saying A Munchkin! Uncle Henry said to Dorothy, with his eyes, No.
They ate a spicy, peculiar meal, very wet, full of moist grit. They wouldn’t know how to describe any of it to Aunt Em when they went back, and they were glad she wasn’t there. She would have swooned with the mystery of it. They liked it, though Uncle Henry chewed with the front of his lips clenched and the sides puckered open for air in case he changed his mind midbite.
“Where are these people from? Why are they here?” asked Dorothy in a whisper, pushing a chopstick into her basket so Toto could have something to gnaw.
“They’re furriners from China, which is across the world,” said Uncle Henry. “They came to build the railroad that we traveled on, and they stayed to open laundries and restaurants.”
“Why didn’t they ever come to Kansas?”
“They must be too smart.”
They both laughed at this, turning red. Dorothy could see that Uncle Henry loved her. It wasn’t his fault she seemed out of her mind.
“Uncle Henry,” said Dorothy before they had finished the grassy tea, “I know you’ve nearly poorhoused yourself to bring me here. I know why you and Aunt Em have done it. You want to show me the world and distract me with reality. It’s a good strategy and a mighty sound ambition. I shall try to repay you for your kindness to me by keeping my mouth shut about Oz.”
“Your sainted Aunt Em chooses to keep mum about it, Dorothy, but she knows you’ve had an experience few can match. However you managed to survive from the time the twister snatched our house away until the time you returned from the wilderness—whatever you scrabbled to find and eat that might have caused this weakness in your head—you nonetheless did manage. No one back home expected we’d ever find your corpse, let alone meet up again with your cheery optimistic self. You’re some pioneer, Dorothy. Every minute of your life is its own real miracle. Don’t deny it by fastening upon the temptation of some tomfoolery.”
She chose her words carefully. “It’s just that it’s all so clear in my mind.”
“A mind is something a young lady from Kansas learns to keep private.”
As they began to pile up their plates, the Munchkin Chinee—that is, the little bowing woman in her silks and satins—scurried to interrupt them, and she brought them each a pastry like a crumpled seedpod. When Uncle Henry and Dorothy looked dubious, she showed them how to crack one open. The fragments tasted like Aunt Em’s biscuits, dry and without savor. Inside, how droll: a scrap of paper in each one.
Marks in a funny squarish language on one side, letters in English on the other.
By the red light of the Chinese lantern leering over their table, Uncle Henry worked to decipher his secret message. His book learning had been scant. “Mid pleasure and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” he read. “John Howard Payne.”
“Pain is right,” said Dorothy. “Meaning no disrespect, Uncle Henry.”
“He has a point, though, Dorothy. Be it ever so humble, and we have the humble part covered good enough, there’s no place like home. Now you read yours.”
“My mind to me a kingdom is, Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That Earth affords or grows by kind. Sir Edward Dyer.”
“Dire is right,” said Uncle Henry.
The hobbled, squinch-eyed woman in red saw them through the beaded curtains toward the street, but at the lacquered door she grabbed Dorothy’s sleeve. “For you,” she said and handed Dorothy a tiny bamboo cage. Inside was a cricket. “For ruck. Cricket for ruck.”
Why do I need luck? Dorothy thought she’d spoken to herself but the woman answered as if she’d spoken aloud. (Maybe she had. Maybe she was dotty, a dodo, like the children had called her. Dotty Dorothy. Dorothy Dodo.)
“You on journey going,” said the old woman, though whether this was an observation, a prophecy, or a swift good-bye, Dorothy couldn’t tell.
Distastefully Dorothy fingered the little cage. The locusts of Kansas had made her dubious about crickets. Still, the little twiglet was alive, for it bounced against its straw-colored bars. It didn’t sing. “I don’t believe animals should be in cages,” she said to Uncle Henry.
“People neither,” he answered, almost by rote. His one-note message. “Don’t cage yourself in your fantasticals, girl. Before it’s too late, get your mind out of Oz, or you’ll be sorry.”
“I take your point, Uncle Henry. I’ve taken it for some time now.”
“You’re welcome.” He put his hand on his rib and breathed through the pain for a moment.
They walked down the street in silence, under a magnificently carved and painted gateway that spanned the street. Electrification had come to San Francisco and the granite of the buildings glittered as if crystals of snow were salted into the stone. It seemed a nonsense-day and a half-night at the same time.
Maybe Uncle Henry was right. Maybe there was enough in this world to make her forget Oz. But was that the right motivation for marrying a Kansas farmer, assuming she could land one?
Only, she supposed, if he was the right farmer.
At the hotel she begged Uncle Henry that they ride the lift up to their floor. “Your Auntie Em wouldn’t approve, fretting for our safety,” he replied. “Whether she’s around to notice or not, I never behave as she’d disagree with, in honor of her.”
What a set of stairs to walk up, she thought.
But when they reached the fifth floor, he winked at her and kept going. Three, four more flights. She followed wordlessly. At the top level they found a door. It opened easily enough to reveal to them a glowing cityscape. The canyons between buildings were running with light and sound. On the electric blue darkness, all around Dorothy and Uncle Henry, hung the illuminated windows of people in rooms. A museum of their living lives. Golden squares and rectangles. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “no fibbing—it’s better than the Emerald City! But where is the ocean? We’re so high. Can we see it?”
They worked out which direction to look. This late at night there was nothing except for darkness. “That empty place without lights,” said Uncle Henry. “It must be there, though you can’t see it.”
“Some say that about … other places,” she replied, but not harshly. “Beyond the ocean, what’s there?”
“The land of the Japanee and the Chinee. A whole society of them, all talking in that singy-song way they got.”
“And the ocean.” She could hardly bear it. “What’s it like?”
“I never seen it yet, but tomorrow we can come back up here.”
She was lost that night, when she finally managed to sleep, in the raspy claws of dreams that wouldn’t declare themselves fully. The cricket chirped on one side of her and Uncle Henry wheezed in concert. As the first light weakened the blackness of sky, but long before dawn, Toto began to whine. “Hush, Auntie Em is feeling poorly after our long trip,” whispered Dorothy, but Toto needed to go outside. Dorothy hunched herself into her clothes and grabbed the cricket cage, and let herself out of the room, leaving the door open a crack so she could return without disturbing her worthy relatives.
It didn’t take long to find Toto a scrap of junk ground in which to do his business. Dorothy turned her head. Many of the lights were lowered now but there was a strange apprehensiveness to the street, like the setting of a stage in which a play was about to begin. The charcoal of the night decayed into a smokier shade, still dark but somehow more transparent. “Come on, we’ll be in six kinds of trouble if they find us out on the street alone,” said Dorothy. “Let’s go up.”
In the lobby she saw the elevator man asleep in a lounge chair, his head to one side and his little cap askew. In that funny high-waisted jacket he looked like a flying monkey she’d once known. How were they ever affording this, poor dear Henry and Em, late of the Kansas prairie? So frightened of her. So eager for an acceptable future. She would make it worth their while.
She stepped into the cage and pulled the door shut. The door was fretted, like sets of linked scissors, like the threads of an old apron if you scrub it too hard with lye. Connected to itself, but airy. There was a single control, as far as she could see. She gripped the brass handle and revolved it a full half turn, and the floor began to lift, with Dorothy and Toto and the cricket inside. She almost squealed, but she knew the merest sound might wake the elevator attendant, and she probably risked being put in jail for ambushing a lift and taking it on a joy ride.
The perforated room sailed up past the fifth floor, all the way to the ninth, which led to the roof. She remembered. She tiptoed from the elevator cabin and shouldered her way through the door, into the chill of dawn above the ocean.
In the few moments she’d been rising in the lift, the sky had lightened that much more. The effect was not so smoky, more pearlescent. The buildings at this hour seemed less defined by light. They looked like stone formations left behind after some unimaginable geologic event.
She could make out a tongue of sea beyond the buildings to the west. But no sound from this far away. No apparent motion. Only a lapidary expanse dimming and shading into the sky. No horizon line: just endlessness. Sea and sky inseparable.
Toto began to whimper and to jump around as if he wanted to leap from the ninth floor. “It’s not frightening, it isn’t,” she said, though she didn’t know whether she was trying to convince herself or the dog. “It’s just the ocean, and another world on the other side. You know all about that. You’re the best-traveled mutt in history, Toto. Stop your fussing! What are you fussing about?” The dog appeared to be going mad, running in circles around her and yipping in some sort of distress.
Dorothy set the cricket cage upon the stone barrier that kept people from falling off the flat roof. “You can come out,” she said to the cricket. “I make my own luck, you make yours. Nobody should live in a cage. Never surrender to that.”
The cricket emerged and rubbed some scratchy parts of itself together. Whether it leaped or whether the wind took it, Dorothy couldn’t say. The cricket guest was there one moment and gone the next.
“Safe landing,” she called lightly after it. “Oh, all right, Toto, stop that infernal fussing. The wind isn’t going to take you, too. Once in your life was enough.” She picked up the dog and went back into the building. The elevator was where she had left it, quivering at this height. She would ride it down to the fifth floor, and go in and rest next to her uncle and aunt. She had spied something of the ocean, some little hem of it. The globe was round. She could see there was another world beyond this one. That would have to do. Meanwhile, some corn-blind farmer, walled on four sides of his life by Superior Alfalfa, was waiting for her.
She began her descent. She passed the eighth floor and the seventh. About quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, the buildings of San Francisco started to shake.