At twelve minutes past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco began to quake. Alice Babette Toklas left her bed and looked, bleary-eyed, out of the window, then ran straight to her father’s bedroom: “Do get up,” she told him. “The city is on fire.” After checking on friends, visiting the bank, and picking up a supply of cigarettes, Toklas packed the family silver into a chest and buried it in the garden—a preservation instinct that would serve her well—then took the ferry to Berkeley to spend the night with a friend, unable to bring herself to look back at her hometown blazing behind her. When she returned, Toklas stopped by a local flower shop: the heat of the flames had stirred hundreds of carnations into immediate bloom.
The San Francisco earthquake—the deadliest in American history—left the city in ruins, and indirectly changed the course of Toklas’s life. Three years younger than Stein, she had grown up in the prosperity of San Francisco, just across the bay from Oakland; her father had arrived in America from Poland in 1865, aged twenty, while her mother had grown up in San Francisco, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Prussia. Like Stein, Toklas traveled in Europe as a child, rolling hoops in the Luxembourg Gardens and watching Victor Hugo’s casket process down the Champs-Élysées; as a teenager, she spent six years in Seattle, where her father’s booming mercantile business had headquarters. A talented pianist, she enrolled in the local university’s music conservatory at sixteen, but her life was put on hold when her mother died in 1897, when Toklas was twenty. Her father took her and her younger brother back to San Francisco to live with her grandfather and great-uncle, and she abandoned a promising musical career to wait on a household of demanding Victorian gentlemen.
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