"Oh, look," her mother said, "they push it. By hand. Isn't that something. You'd think in this day and age."
There was no way out of it. The line moved; the conductor, a wiry Filipino man of about sixty with a gold tooth and a ticket punch, waved them aboard; her mother, with the Macy's bags, made at once for the outside bench at the front of the car, nearest the gripman, because it had the best view and because she had never in her life sat anywhere but the front of anything. Mina followed her because the alternative was to make a scene on a turntable. They sat. The car filled up behind them with Ohio, and with a honeymooning couple from Tokyo. Remy stood at the grip lever, two feet in front of her, with his back to her, and pulled on his gloves.
"Folks," he said loudly, to the whole car, without turning around, "welcome aboard the Powell and Hyde. My name is Remy, and that gentleman on the back with the gold tooth and the bad attitude is Manny, and he'll be taking your fares and your abuse. I want to go over a couple of rules before we start. Keep your arms and legs inside the car or Manny will keep them as souvenirs. Hold on to something at all times. And I'll ask everybody, please, for reasons I can't go into, not to talk to the gripman."
There was a ripple of laughter. Mina looked straight ahead.
"I know," he said. "It's a shame. Gripman's got a lot to say. But that's the rule this month. Court order." He reached down and took hold of the big iron lever and drew it back toward his chest, slow and strong, and somewhere under the street the jaws closed on the cable, and the car jerked, and moved, and they were climbing Powell Street.
He talked the whole way up. He could not talk to her, so he talked to the car, and every word of it was hers.
He talked about Andrew Hallidie, who invented the cable car in 1873 because he had watched a team of horses slip on a wet hill and be dragged backward to their deaths, and had decided that a thing that frightened him that much ought to be fixed. ("Some people see a problem and walk away. Some people see a problem and spend the rest of their lives on it. I respect that. I'm on page three hundred and fifty-one of a book I started in 1982. I'm that kind of person.") He talked about the hill. ("Folks, this next block is steep, and nobody's ever ready for it, you can't be, so just hold on and don't think about it too much.") He talked about the bell, as they passed the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, and the doorman in his Beefeater costume waved, and Remy rang a quick bright rattle back at him, clang-a-lang-a-lang. ("Every gripman's got his own ring. It's like a signature. You can be blind on Powell Street and know who's coming. Mine's not the fanciest, but it's honest. It means 'Here I am. I'm not going anywhere you can't follow.'")
"He's very good," her mother said to Mina in a whisper that could have been heard in Oakland. "What a nice voice. Is he Italian? He looks Italian."
"Ma."
"I'm just saying." Her mother leaned forward and tapped him on the back with a Macy's bag. "Young man. Excuse me. Are you Italian?"
"Ma'am," Remy said, over his shoulder, eyes forward on the rails, "I'm under strict instructions not to talk to passengers in the front row today. But I'll say this. My father's people are from Genoa, and my mother's are from Quebec, and between them I learned how to argue in three languages and win in none."