Prologue
Out of Oz
t would take Dorothy Gale and her relatives three days to reach the moun- Itains 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
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cloudy afternoon it maneuvered through so many switchbacks that the trav- elers 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 f o r m a t i o n . “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 disap- pointed. 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
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Aunt Em. All these flights up, it smelled of lilacs and hair oil and horse manure and hot sourdough loaves. Encouraged, the flatlanders ventured out- doors. Dorothy carried Toto in a wicker basket, for old time’s 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 ear- rings 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 frank- furter 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 alter- native,” 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.A lone. 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 seven- teen.” Uncle Henry’s eyes glinted merrily and he mouthed across his wife’s head at Dorothy: Too young.
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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 revela- tion, they are skeptical when asked to accept any whole cloth gospel not measurable by brass tacks they’ve walloped into the dry goods counter them- selves. 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 dis- trict. 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 unani- mous 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 yammer- ing 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
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