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Page 96
On the steep slope of California, the automobile traffic flowed with an elegant disdain of the slippery pavement and the narrow-gauge tracks and cable slot of the cable car system occupying the center of the street. San Franciscans clung serenely to a transportation system that was a hundred years old and notoriously unsafe. They airily ignored prudence and common sense, riding the cable car running boards, regularly falling off and injuring themselves on the brick pavements. They suffered worse injuries, and even death, when primitive caliper-style braking systems or their brawny operators failed, allowing the quaint and colorful cable cars to plunge down the steep hills out of control, costing the city huge sums of settlement money, awarded by juries of its own citizens.
Jacob Neville, an unreconstructed New Yorker, had disliked San Francisco as too theatrical, too aware of its physical elegance, too smug. Those who did sleep in the streets of San Francisco had never convinced him they were not indulging in middle-class perversity. He said the Bay Area's true ghetto was across the bay in Oakland, the city of which Gertrude Stein was reputed to have said that "there was no there there."
Jake loved to puncture other people's enthusiasms, make fun of them, especially Anna's. He was half-drunk the night before he died, telling intimate tales about his life with Anna, embarrassing Sean and humiliating her. Jake always despised Anna's lovers. It had given him an odd pleasure to recognize them as such, then to accept them, all the while showing his contempt for their animal weaknesses.
I wonder what my life would have been like if my father had not hated my mother, Anna thought. The Vicar had married in haste, waited until she was born, and swiftly divorced. Her mother had let their only daughter go to her father by default. In 1970 Christiane Mathis Piacelli had died in Portofino, where she had gone to celebrate her fifth divorce. Anna did not attend the elaborate funeral staged by her mother's last ex-husband, an Italian film producer.
The Reverend Mathis had been a poor father, but a de-

 
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