Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [59]
Throughout the city, children danced in the waters, built rafts, teased pets into leaping off porches. They converged on the beach. The surf rocketing into the sky off the streetcar trestle was easily as good as a fireworks display. That morning Mrs. Charles Vidor got a call from her cousin, excitedly telling her of the marvelous sights and urging her to bring her son down for a look. The boy had the lofty name of King. Later, after he had become one of Hollywood’s most important directors, King Vidor wrote a fictional account of a hurricane for Esquire magazine grounded on his experience in Galveston. “I remember now that it seemed as if we were in a bowl looking up toward the level of the sea. As we stood there in the sandy street, my mother and I, I wanted to take my mother’s hand and hurry her away. I felt as if the sea was going to break over the edge of the bowl and come pouring down upon us.”
LOUISE HOPKINS WAS just seven years old, and found double delight in Saturday morning. It had been such a hard week. School had started. Having just turned seven, she had become eligible for first grade, a prospect that had excited her no end but also gave her nightmares and made sleeping next to impossible. Not that anyone could ever sleep well with all that heat and the huge mosquitoes that blew in through the open windows in clouds as thick as dust. The first day of school had been the worst of all. “I left home, nervously holding the hand of my big sister, my brand new lunch basket and a second-hand first-grade reader in the other.” But now that particular nightmare was behind her. It was Saturday. No school. The weekend. And what a weekend it was shaping up to be. There was the delicious threat of a storm. The wind was up. Best of all, the air was cool—almost chilly. It felt so good after the long, murderously hot summer. She had heard talk from her mother and from the medical students who boarded at her house of children in other places who had actually died from the heat.
Rain threatened. She raced to her closet and threw on her “Saturday” dress—the one that could become dirty without bringing down buckets of trouble. From her porch she bellowed for her best-ever friend, Martha, across the street, and soon, like magic, Martha did emerge, clothed in her own rough-time dress. Louise’s mother emerged too, scowling, shushing Louise lest her shrieking wake the herd of young doctors who had just moved in upstairs for the start of the new year of medical school.
Louise did not know what to think about the doctors. There were so many of them. Sometimes they made the dining room as crowded as the train station on Sunday morning. At times she counted as many as twenty of them at the breakfast table, including medical students who came just for the meals. They talked of such strange things and always looked at you like if you did something wrong you would end up in one of those little funny-smelling jars they kept in their rooms with those mushy red-and-pink things floating around like little dead frogs only without the skin. Some days the doctors smelled just like the bottles.
Louise’s father had died when she was a baby and her mother had not remarried. Louise had two brothers, John and Mason, and a sister, Lois, who was one year older than she. Their mother had added a second floor to the house, full of rental rooms so that she could earn an income at home without leaving the children. The house was perfectly located, near the University of Texas Medical School and two hospitals. Mrs. Hopkins filled the kitchen with huge sacks of green coffee, which she roasted and ground herself. She kept great drums of lard. “Our home was not only a home,” Louise said, “but a living.”
It was not insured.
“Martha was as glad as I to enjoy the cool windy day,” Louise said. “We were not concerned the wind was stronger and the clouds darker than usual and as far as I knew neither was my mother,