That Saturday night in the middle of August, Blanche wakes in her armchair. Her leg throbs painfully, reminding her of the collision with the high-wheeler, the thug at Durand’s brasserie, and her new acquaintance Jenny Bonnet, who’s stretched out on the couch, snoozing like some cat.
What’s roused Blanche is the men coming in. “There’s some ridiculous con on the sofa with meat on his face,” Ernest is remarking to Arthur in the whimsical tone that means he’s soused.
“Mister, the evening is over,” Arthur murmurs, leaning over the back of the couch in the pose of a spread-winged angel.
As if Blanche would bring some micheton home. How could Arthur think that? “No, my love, it’s just a girl,” she tells him. (Speaking English, as has been their habit since the three of them stepped off the ship, because it’s the only way to get ahead in this country.) “She needed a rest.”
“Don’t we all.” Ernest’s long jaw cracks open into a great yawn as he hangs his bowler on an empty bottle.
“What a heart you have, chérie,” murmurs Arthur, coming over to give Blanche an appreciative kiss.
Jenny blinks and grins at the company, pulling the steak off her eye.
“Arthur Deneve—Jenny Bonnet,” says Blanche, waving instead of getting up. She savors her fancy man through the visitor’s eyes: his elegant eyebrows; the slim checked pants that sit just so, even in this heat; his strong hands studded with rings (black intaglio, bloodstone, a signet A); those cuff links, each painted with a tiny horse and rider, she blew so much on for his thirtieth birthday last year … For all Arthur’s love of unconventionality, he’s a scrupulous dandy.
“Enchanté,” he says with one of his slightly mocking bows.
“Oh, and Ernest Girard,” she adds with a gesture at the younger man.
Who only nods. “Now, why don’t you toss her out,” Ernest suggests, “so we’ll have room to sit down?”
Arthur raps the floor with his crystal-topped cane. “Where’s your sense of hospitality?” he scolds his friend.
Jenny places the steak on the folded newspaper on the carpet. In the manner of a magician who’s seen better days, she pulls a crumpled handkerchief from her brown-edged cuff and wipes her face.
Ernest lets out a mocking wolf whistle.
Rich purple all around her eye, the lid half shut. “Am I going to have a pirate’s patch?” Jenny laughs.
“I’ll say,” says Arthur.
“She had a run-in with a brute chez Durand,” Blanche explains, leaving herself out of it. She never lies to Arthur, but she doesn’t need to tell the whole truth. Living together has much in common with horse-handling, it strikes her now: best to keep the tone soothing, the signals simple.
“So whose pantalon are you wearing?” Ernest asks the visitor.
“My own,” says Jenny.
“She’s just done forty days for those pants,” Blanche puts in, figuring it’s better to introduce the subject of Jenny’s recent jail time in this playful way.
“Chacun ses goûts,” says Arthur with a tolerant smile, “‘to each his own’ and all that.”
Ernest is down to shirtsleeves now. The fuzz is shadowing the young man’s jaw and throat already, Blanche notices, though he always shaves before going out in the evening; Arthur sometimes calls him his gorilla. Ernest is wearing exactly the same mustache as his friend this season—a wax-stiff pair of wings—but somehow Ernest’s appears stuck on. How unfair, Blanche thinks, not for the first time, that his strong features, genteel pallor, and impressive height somehow don’t add up. Arthur—a head shorter, with Mediterranean coloring, past thirty—is the peacock everyone wants to stroke.
“Forty days, for such a triviality?” Ernest exclaims.
“There’s nothing trivial about clothes,” Arthur reminds him in a scandalized tone, taking off his jacket and folding it carefully over the back of a cane chair. “They maketh the man, and all that.”
“As the fellow says, there’s never been a naked president,” Jenny points out, which earns her a grin from Arthur.
“Remember the old joke about Déjazet when she was doing breeches parts?” Ernest asks him. “She complained to a friend, ‘Half Paris thinks I’m a man.’”
“‘Qu’importe, don’t worry’”—Arthur delivers the punch line with a leer—” ‘the other half knows you ain’t!’”
Jenny sniggers. “I heard that before—about Adah Menken, I think it was.”
Jokes must be like songs, Blanche supposes: the words change when they cross an ocean. “It’s funny that travesty’s all the rage onstage,” she says with a little laugh, “but if you step into the street, the same pants will get you locked up.”
“It’s usually a fine,” Jenny tells her. “The cops been catching me and letting me go every month or two for a couple of years now, all very cat and mouse.”
“How much of a fine?” Ernest wants to know, sitting down.
“Ten bucks—and then there’s the lawyer’s fee on top,” complains Jenny. “Once I made mine tell the judge that I considered the whole thing an infringement on the rights of women, and the son of a bitch fined me twenty.”
“How come you ended up in jail this time?” asks Arthur.
Jenny makes a face as if she has a toothache. “Sacked my lawyer and demanded a jury instead of a judge. I told them the truth, that I don’t have any other clothes, and would they prefer me to walk around naked as a worm?”
Hoots all round.
“Turned out twelve good men and true didn’t look any kindlier on me than one. Now, spending forty days dry,” she adds ruefully, “that was the real kick in the pants—as it were!”
“Speaking of which—some cognac?” proposes Arthur, getting up.
“I can’t believe you sacked your lawyer,” Blanche tells Jenny. “When your Maman said not to touch the stove because it would burn you, I bet you went right ahead and touched it.”
“How else was I supposed to know if she was lying?”
“Why would somebody lie about a stove?” wonders Blanche.
“Folks always lie to kids, don’t they?”
“Tell me we’ve still got ice,” Arthur calls theatrically from the passage.
“In the closet, under a blanket,” Blanche calls back. “It was the coolest place I could find.”
“Alaskan or Nevadan?” Ernest demands.
Blanche gives him a look. “Are you claiming you can taste the difference?”
“Got both? We could test him blindfolded,” suggests Jenny.
“Well,” says Ernest, conceding, “so long as it’s not that machine-made muck.”
“Practically a puddle,” complains Arthur, coming back in with the bowl. He hands the ladies their cognacs with a few pebbles of ice in each glass.
“Any luck at the game tonight, mon beau?” Blanche asks him under her breath.
Arthur winks.
Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. She’s more used to hearing about “disappointments” or “mishaps,” as the fellows of the sporting set refer to losses.
“Heureux au jeu, malheureux en amour,” Ernest intones lugubriously from the floor.
“Oh, I think I’m lucky in both lines, gaming and love,” says Arthur, giving Blanche another long, spirituous kiss.
She wishes they could go to bed, right this minute.
“What’s your game, gentlemen?” Jenny’s asking.
“Faro, of course,” says Ernest. “It gives the best odds, unless the bank’s rigged.”
“You know a house in America where it’s not?”
“My friend and I seem to make out all right,” he says sleekly.
Jenny breaks into satirical song. “‘For work I’m too lazy,’” she trills, beating time on her thigh.
And beggin’s too low,
Train-robbin’s too dang’rous,
To gambling I’ll go.
The men cackle at that. Blanche thought they’d have sent Jenny on her way by now, but they seem to be enjoying her no end. Clearly Blanche should bring strangers home more often.
“Was your petite amie out with you two this evening?” Blanche asks Ernest.
“Madeleine?”
“As if you ain’t sure which I mean because you have so many lady friends and not just one loyal old blonde!”
A rueful smirk from Ernest. Blanche has teased him about Madeleine’s age so often, it has no sting anymore. Madeleine’s placid as well as lovely, and she never seems to object to the fact that her young man spends at least as much time here, in the spare bedroom of his old intimates from Paris, as he does at her place.
“No, we were a pair of lonely bachelors tonight,” says Arthur, striking a mournful pose. “Is that your bicycle we tripped over in the hall?” he asks Jenny.
“Such a pleasure to study one up close,” says Ernest, “if only in the dark, with our shins. I saw one just like it selling for two hundred bucks the other day,” he tells Arthur.
Blanche’s eyebrows soar at the price. “Jenny, ahem, found this one on Market Street.”
“Ah, the divine workings of chance,” says Arthur, blowing a kiss toward the sky. “Five foot, is it, that front wheel?”
“Four foot nine,” says Jenny fondly. “It shoots down California or Sutter at about twenty miles an hour. The next best thing to being an eagle.”
“And on the flat?” asks Ernest.
“Smooth as silk. The knack of it is, prop your feet in front of the handlebars so if you meet an obstacle you can jump free.”
“An obstacle such as … me,” Blanche can’t resist adding.
Jenny’s grin is devilish. “Well, even birds crash, the odd time. Those high buildings going up downtown, with their yards of plate glass—I’ve seen a gull break its neck against a window.”
“Ah, you ain’t a true citizen of this city until somebody’s run you over,” Ernest says with a yawn.
“Sounds as if you’ve had quite a night, ma puce,” murmurs Arthur to Blanche, caressing her neck.
Oh, she could ride him right here in the chair. Leaning back, Blanche straightens her stiff leg, rotating her ankle. “You owe me a spin on that machine of yours sometime,” she tells Jenny.
Who grimaces. “I know you’re a dancer, but I’m afraid that, to master the high-wheeler, you’d have to be something of an acrobat.”
Ernest and Blanche burst into simultaneous laughter.
Blanche lets the visitor in on the joke. “The three of us happen to have forgotten more about acrobatics than you’ll ever know.”
“My partner here was the best flier in the Cirque d’Hiver,” boasts Ernest, patting Arthur’s glossy shoe.
“Ah, les jours anciens.” A dark edge to Arthur’s voice. “Ancient history now.”
How much does her man miss being the lean aerialist of those past times? Blanche wonders. Arthur’s muscles aren’t gone, just softened, looser on his frame, and from his perfect carriage, you’d never know about his back. Who can take their eyes off him?
“Well, I’ll be damned,” murmurs Jenny. “The Cirque d’Hiver in Paris?”
Blanche spreads her hands as if to say, Where else? “That’s where we learned our English, from a pair of genuine Yankee cowboys in the troupe.”
“The Cirque d’Hiver’s where our master Léotard invented the flying trapeze,” Ernest puts in, “no matter what charlatans claim otherwise.”
“Hey, did you wear those skintight fleshings?” asks Jenny.
“As the maestro used to tell us,” Ernest remarks, stroking his thigh, “if you want the crowd to love you, the trapeze is optional, but the fleshings are compulsory.”
“Enough nostalgia,” commands Arthur, cutting through Jenny’s laughter. “We were always cold, underdressed, and underpaid.” He gets up and stalks over to refill his glass.
“And you, Blanche,” Jenny pushes on, “what class of artiste were you? Wait, you mentioned horses earlier—”
She listens, this one, Blanche notes.
“An equestrienne?”
Blanche smiles. She knows Arthur wants to drop the topic, but—
“Bareback?”
She nods. “Jumping ribbons, bursting hoops, scenic riding, Roman …”
Jenny lets out a respectful whistle. “The Wilson Circus came to town when I was a kid,” she reminisces, “with this dazzler of a Creole rider, Mademoiselle Zoyara. Turned out after, she was actually one hundred percent man.”
“Des conneries!” scoffs Ernest.
“Just telling it as I heard it. Well, I guess this is my lucky night. Genuine stars of the Cirque d’Hiver,” Jenny marvels. “How high up was your trapeze hung?”
She throws the question in Arthur’s direction, but he ignores it, sipping his cognac.
She persists. “What was your riskiest trick?”
“They’re called passes,” Ernest corrects her.
“No nets, I hope?”
He gives a snort of contempt.
“Ever fall?” asks Jenny.
The young woman doesn’t know it, but she’s gone too far. “Everybody falls,” says Blanche, to close the subject. She means it to sound nonchalant, but it comes out shrill.
“Speaking of risky,” says Arthur, staring under the sofa with his head on one side, “is that a revolver?”
“My single-action army .45,” says Jenny with satisfaction. She hooks it up with one finger to show it off: reddish wood and silvery metal. Blanche reckons the thing must be a foot long.
“This is one strange class of female,” Ernest remarks to Arthur.
A shrug from Jenny. “Why should your lot have all the firepower? As they say, God made men and women, but Sam Colt made them equal.”
Arthur bursts out laughing. “Who says that?”
“I bet you’ve never fired that thing,” Ernest mocks, weighing the revolver in his hand.
“Into the air, a couple times,” Jenny tells him.
He sniggers. “Can’t bite? Don’t bark.”
“The air’s the best place to shoot,” she insists. “A gun’s for keeping trouble at bay.”
Arthur holds out his hand for the Colt, takes it, and fingers its metalwork.
“Well, tonight at Durand’s, it welcomed trouble in,” mutters Blanche.
“Because tonight’s fellow was a foolhardy loggerhead,” says Jenny.
“Oh, he was foolhardy?” Blanche rolls her eyes. All that makes this creature halfway tolerable, she decides, is that she delivers her bluster with a wink.
“It’s the weather,” says Ernest, “making tempers flare all over. At the table beside ours this evening, a pair of Spaniards went for each other’s throats.”
Jenny grins at the image.
“Well,” says Arthur, handing the Colt, butt-first, back to Jenny, “I suppose if a girl means to swagger around Chinatown in pants, she’s as well off carrying something.”
Blanche snorts. “I’ve never had any difficulty. The neighborhood’s notoriety is more than half invented, to give tourists a thrill. Ying upstairs told me the guides have taken to staging brawls in Fish Alley, paying fifty cents a man!”
“Yeah,” says Jenny, jerking her head north, “the Barbary Coast dens are ten times more dangerous than Chinatown.”
“Nowhere’s dangerous if you know what you’re doing,” says Arthur silkily. “My friend and I go all over the City, wherever our affairs happen to take us.”
Blanche holds her tongue. Affairs, he always says, as if he and Ernest are partners in some serious line when all they do, between faro games, is hand wads of cash to dodgy characters they call “business associates,” money they rarely see again. Or they wine and dine richer suckers in the hopes of persuading them to share the risk of one of the schemes in which Arthur and Ernest are already entangled.
“Do you bring protection yourselves, gentlemen?”
Arthur smiles. “Americans are so gun-crazy. A knife’s more reliable and won’t spoil the line of a suit.”
Blanche couldn’t swear to whether her lover’s ever used it, the stiletto he’s carried as long as she’s known him. She can imagine it, though. Arthur stays good-humored longer than most men, but when he finally loses his temper, it’s not a pretty sight. A couple of times over the years, he and Ernest have made vague references to having to persuade a fellow of something, or teach him a lesson … But Blanche doesn’t ask. She does her leg shows and meets her michetons, and the men lay their wagers and run their schemes.
Ernest’s asking Jenny what she lives on. “Frog-catcher—is that slang for something dirty?” he wonders hopefully.
“It’s what it says.”
“What a deliciously bizarre trade,” says Arthur.
“These free spirits despise all trades,” Blanche warns Jenny. “Arthur claims the only truly honest way to make a buck is by chance, whether at the gaming table or the Exchange.”
Her lover grins. “There is a certain grace to speculation.”
“Blanche is just not naturally indolent enough to be a true bohemian like us.” Ernest sighs. “Nose to the grindstone, night after night …”
His graphic mime of her giving some micheton a below-job makes Arthur burst out laughing.
Blanche feels irritation grip her temples like the claws of a bird. It’s true, and it’s no secret, so why should she mind? It’s just that Ernest’s bobbing head is like a distorted reflection of herself in some filthy pool.
Jenny’s eyes are on her, watchful.
Blanche makes herself giggle too. “Just as well I work so hard, or there are times we might have starved.”
That came out wrong: not witty but biting.
Arthur’s smile has faded at the edges. Then he leans back languidly as if posing for an artist. “Starving’s terribly bohemian.”
He’s saved the moment, Blanche thinks with a rush of relief.
Ernest puts in a caveat: “So long as we’ve always got a bottle and a cigar!”
Without anyone noticing, the apartment seems to have filled with light. Blanche squints at the windows: another satané sunny day.
Hoisting herself to her feet, Jenny begins her round of thanks.
“Is that your blood or the cow’s?” Arthur wants to know.
Yawning, as she buttons her jacket over her shirtfront: “A splash of each. The puke’s definitely mine.”
“You can’t go out there looking like that,” scolds Arthur. “We Français must maintain our reputation for chic.”
“I’m hunky-dory,” says Jenny, dropping her revolver into her trouser pocket.
“Find her something, would you, my sweet?” Arthur asks Blanche.
Who goes into the bedroom. First she puts the rest of the cash she earned this evening into a shabby high-heeled boot under the bed. (A little nest egg she’s never felt the need to mention to Arthur.) The deed to the building she keeps tucked behind a lithograph of his favorite painting: a strange picnic in which a naked woman sits on the grass between two black-jacketed dandies.
Then Blanche opens a tin-covered trunk, still bearing its pasted labels from when they arrived on the Utopia. (Arthur likes to keep his things perfectly folded but refuses to succumb to anything as respectable as a chest of drawers.) She picks out one of his shirts—not the newest, because they may never run into this Jenny character again, but still an elegant one, greenish, with a flowering-vine motif.
By the time she gets back to the salon, Arthur’s dusted off the steak and thrown it into a chafing dish over the flame of the spirit lamp. He’s scrambling some eggs too. Jenny goes into the bedroom to change. Arthur sends Ernest out for bread, and Blanche back into the bedroom to see if their visitor needs anything else.
Blanche finds Jenny pulling the shirt on over her head; the way men do it, it strikes her.
“A little privacy,” snaps Jenny.
Blanche recoils, turning her back. What the hell does Jenny think she’s hiding? As if it’s not perfectly clear she’s got a pair of little breasts under there …
“Thanks for the shirt,” says Jenny, her voice so civil now it’s as if Blanche imagined her angry tone. “First time in a fancy-patterned one.”
Blanche doesn’t answer, just heads for the salon.
“Who’s the baby?”
That freezes her.
Jenny’s plucked the silver frame out of a litter of kohl, rouge, and jewelry on the small table.
“Our son.” It sounds grand, solemn. Blanche has never had to explain the photograph before. “P’tit,” she adds, diffident. She calls him that, but really it’s P’tit Arthur—Little Arthur.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh no, he’s not—he’s being nursed out, on a farm, for his health,” Blanche clarifies. “I was taken sick after he was born …”
Memories like flotsam looming through the fog of that dimly remembered milk fever. How the creature leaked from every aperture—emerald pus in the corners of his eyes, even—and wouldn’t touch her right nipple but worried her left till it bled, and keened from five o’clock every afternoon on until the whole building seemed to shake … Blanche was delirious and vomiting by the time Arthur carried the infant away to ask Madame Johanna’s advice. His decisiveness filled Blanche with gratitude, especially when Madame found some compatriots of her own, the Hoffmans, to take P’tit in at once. Even though Blanche hurt twice as much when P’tit was gone—her left breast swelling up like something out of a dime museum, so ugly that she refused to let Arthur set eyes on her without a wrap for a week—it was such a relief, being quiet, alone with the pain.
Jenny’s scrutinizing the carte de visite. “But you said for his health. What’s wrong with him?”
Blanche blinks at the blunt question. “Nothing.” Nothing in particular, that is. True to his name, P’tit’s still tiny, except for the huge eyes. There’s a lassitude to him, a dullness that disappoints her. But Blanche’s siblings were all older than her, so what does she know about how babies should be? At least his belly’s round; when she reports this to Arthur, he always says it’s proof that P’tit must be eating well at the Hoffmans’. “It’s the done thing, you know, back home,” she says, her voice defensive.
“Is it?”
“You wouldn’t remember, because you left so young. One never sees a baby in Paris; they don’t thrive in cities. And rents are so high, mothers have to work … We were all farmed out to country folk,” she goes on, struggling to remember the name of the woman who looked after her. “I barely set eyes on my family till I was—” Three? Four? Blanche doesn’t recall how old she was, the day she was brought back. Just the feeling of being deposited among strangers, in that narrow house on the urban islet of Ile Saint-Louis that, she was informed, was home.
“So how old is your P’tit now?” asks Jenny, setting the picture back on the table.
“Almost—” Blanche reckons the months in her head, and is startled. Last week. How could the date have gone right by without her noticing? Was she drunk that day—drunker than usual? “Just about a year,” she says vaguely. Oh, well, never mind; a one-year-old doesn’t know what a birthday is.
“Do you visit much?” asks Jenny, putting on her waistcoat.
What a talent this one has for putting her nose in other people’s business. And her finger on sore points. “A nurse from the farm brings him,” says Blanche, as if answering the question.
Not to 815 Sacramento Street; P’tit hasn’t been back here since Arthur took him away to Madame. The nurse totes him in a basket to meet Blanche at the House of Mirrors. In the early months it was every week, without fail, even before Blanche had her health back. Of course she missed her little one; what kind of unnatural mother would she have been if she hadn’t missed him? Arthur came with her; two or three times, anyway. These days, the visits have slid to once a month, more or less, without Blanche recalling who set that schedule. They bore her and leave her vaguely uneasy. Blanche smiles and nods at her son’s slightly misshapen face for a quarter of an hour, privately wondering why he’s got a faint reek about him despite being trussed up in layers of starched linen. She once asked the taciturn, uniformed nurse, who looked offended and told her that was how they smelled, infants. Blanche doesn’t make the mistake of trying to pick P’tit up anymore; some babies just won’t stand for being fussed over, according to the nurse, who should know, Blanche supposes. She always brings him a molasses stick to suck, at least.
If she weren’t so busy all the time … It’ll be different when P’tit is old enough to respond more to her company, or at least recognize her. She’s just waiting till he’s got some spark in him, till he could be said to be thriving. Till he’s grown into the makings of a son worthy of the name of P’tit Arthur Deneve.
“What kind of farm,” Jenny wonders aloud as she buttons her jacket, “dairy, poultry, tillage?”
“Why do you ask?” says Blanche, nettled, instead of admitting she doesn’t know. Really, why should she allow herself to be interrogated about the finer points of the arrangement? It hardly matters whether the Hoffmans keep cows or chickens; P’tit’s too young to notice. He won’t remember, any more than Blanche recalls her first years. Dairy or goddamn tillage! She hasn’t been out to the farm yet, as it happens. Madame vouches for the place and seems happy to arrange P’tit’s visits to the House of Mirrors, so much more convenient than Blanche going out to the Hoffmans’. It all works perfectly well, so who does this stranger think she is, with her prodding and probing?
The front door; that must be Ernest with the bread. “A table, messieurs-dames,” calls Arthur, and they go in for breakfast.
At San Miguel Station, the fifteenth of September stops and starts, stops and starts. Only when Blanche notices she’s twisting her neck to get her face out of a puddle of light does she realize that it’s day. And then the terror seizes her again as she remembers: Arthur tried to kill her last night. It was only the wildest stroke of luck that shielded her, a one-in-a-million chance. There’s not a mark on Blanche except a tiny graze on her cheek from flying glass. It should have been me, not poor Jenny.
“Care for a wash, Miss Blanche?” offers Mary Jane McNamara.
She looks down at her ghastly browned clothes. “Have the police—”
“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of them yet,” says Mary Jane. “Dadda had to send another telegram in case the first one went astray, and Mrs. Holt wanted to know if he was doubting her competence.” Her tone bubbles. This murder is clearly the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened in the girl’s vicinity.
Blanche remembers being fifteen: the dull, shackled sensation that life is something that happens to other people. And then one day, with no warning, it begins.
Blanche went to see the circus, that’s all she did, a harmless way to spend a winter afternoon. And found herself gawking up at a beautiful olive-skinned man flying like a knife across the gilded ceiling. The crowd sang along to that year’s hit waltz:
He’d smile from the bar on the people below,
And one night he smiled on my love.
She winked back at him and she shouted, “Bravo!”
As he hung by his nose up above.
Blanche hung around the stage door for hours, not caring that she was cold or that she was missing her supper, at least, or earning herself a beating. At last he came out, in street clothes and half drunk already, the lovely man; his greasepaint was meticulously wiped off but his face still held the eye. One arm slung around a lanky boy with the beginnings of a mustache. (That was Ernest; Blanche didn’t pay him much attention at first. Didn’t know how many years ago Arthur had taken this orphan on as his protégé, his circus brother.) She hung around, chattering and flirting as hard as she could, till night fell.
She came back the next day. He was a thrilling exotic to her: Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve. Twenty-two, and a man of the world; he’d read things, been places, tried everything. He boasted of being a bohemian, and Blanche didn’t even know the word, but she swore she was one too. She was fifteen, and barely had a bosom yet, but it was just as well, because circus girls needed to be as light as air, and soon Arthur was persuading his Monsieur Loyal to try her out on the Shetland pony …
But what does all that matter now? What does it prove? That Arthur was a fine piece of manhood until this summer? Until circumstances conspired to—no, let’s be honest. Until Blanche broke him. Broke his heart, his spirit. Broke the charming man Arthur seemed to be, cracked that shell and let the devil seep out. Maybe it just proves she was an idiot to fall in love with him nine years ago.
Her brain’s still moving at half-pace. It must be tiredness. And shock. If Arthur wanted me dead last night, he wants me dead today. She’d better run for her life. But not in these clothes, Blanche decides, staring down at herself.
Like some automaton, she follows Mary Jane out of the Eight Mile House. On the threshold between the saloon and the rickety porch, her feet lock, refusing to carry her into the hard brightness. She straightens her aching shoulders and makes herself step forward, steeling herself against imagined gunfire. (As if muscles could repel buckshot!) The air’s heating up already, dusty; better than the stink of blood and whiskey, at least. Blanche puts up one hand to shield her face. Where’s her straw hat? Even under these circumstances, she finds—even today—she’s not willing to get a freckle. Her translucent pallor is one of the things Blanche is known for, the promise in her name. Otherwise she’d just be plain Adèle Beunon again.
Blanche scans the ragged settlement of San Miguel Station for any sign of danger. There’s Jordan’s poor excuse for a country store, just across the baked yard to her left; his low frame building and McNamara’s squat by the County Road like a pair of robbers planning to waylay travelers. Right now the road’s a powdering line with not a vehicle, not a person on it as far as the eye can see. A stone’s throw to the northeast stands the flat brown railroad depot, ruled by Mrs. Holt. In the distance to the southwest, the log cabin where that pair of Canadians scratch out a living—Louis, the man goes by, Blanche remembers, but whether first name or surname, she doesn’t know. Farther out, a scattering of shacks; what laborers or squatters subsist there? Then nothing but sandlots, ruled by rats and fleas.
“This way,” calls Mary Jane impatiently, beckoning her round the back of the Eight Mile House.
Blanche holds her breath as she follows the girl past the tiny, fetid box with a crescent cut into the door: the toilet where the twelve-year-old took fright at the sound of the shots. “How’s your brother?”
“Wee Jeremiah? Sick with nightmares half the night.”
“No, John Jr. His arm.”
“I couldn’t tell you.” Mary Jane tosses her head. “That fella’s always mooching off on his own.”
Who’d be an eldest girl if she had a choice, really? Blanche wonders. All the mopping and potato-peeling and minding the little ones …
An old sheet held up with sticks passes for a screen, a pail of pond water behind it. With clumsy hands Blanche picks at her encrusted buttons. How muddy blood turns as it hardens. Now she’s got the shakes, like some drunk shuddering outside a barrelhouse before dawn. “Mary Jane?” she calls hoarsely.
No answer.
She clears her throat and tries again. “Mary Jane? If you could—”
But when Blanche puts her head around the sheet, there’s no one there. Only her own large carpetbag, incongruously festive with its orange arabesques. A stain on the top that’s been wiped off, not carefully enough.
Well. These people met her only Tuesday. To the McNamaras, Blanche is just some stranger left behind like storm debris on their doorstep. They may even have guessed by now that it’s she who brought this horror to San Miguel Station.
They’re trash themselves, she reminds herself. Down on your knees, you should be, Miss Blanche, Ellen McNamara had the gall to tell her last night. The grandiose slattern clearly thinks herself a cut above Blanche. But didn’t they all leave that kind of humbug back in the Old World? You Frog whore, that’s what Ellen would like to call Blanche, no doubt, except that the woman probably can’t bring herself to say such a word because the Irish are the prudes of Europe. (Always have more children than they can feed, then go round crossing themselves as if they don’t know what fucking is.)
Blanche stares at her hands, willing them to be steady. Surely she can do this much, get her own stinking clothes off. First she tackles her right boot, finally undoing that wretched gaiter. Then the blood-spotted mauve skirt, the bodice, the sleeves so narrow she can barely wrench them over her knuckles, the stiffened corset, sweaty chemise, petticoats, and knickers—she drops them all on the sandy ground.
Blanche avoids looking down at herself. Nothing glamorous about her in this brutal light: raw, peeled, hideously bare, with the reek of death about her. Scooping the water over her shoulder fast, she scrubs herself with the rag. For all the heat of the morning she shudders as if she’s scraping off her own skin. She takes the nailbrush to her long fingernails so hard that her fingertips are soon sore.
Small mercies: Blanche has an extra corset in her bag to cinch her into some simulacrum of her usual self. She rotates her bustle, checking the cotton sheath of every metal band. One brown stain, the size of a penny … but that can’t be helped, and Blanche doesn’t mean to trail around as flat-skirted as some hick, not today of all days. She tightens the tapes as if girding on armor.
The bag holds no garment quite right for the morning after a murder. She finds herself dithering between a skirt with orange and white stripes and a blue plaid one with deep matching flounces. Hurry, hurry. But telling herself that doesn’t make it any easier to choose. This is absurd. A prickling burr of a tune dances in the back of her mind: “Then I was gayest of the gay …”
After yanking on the blue skirt, Blanche adds a yellow jacket-bodice, yellow striped stockings, and a pair of white mules with little heels. Pulls out her second-best parasol. That’s all she’s got, all she thought to stuff in her carpetbag before she marched away from number 815 Sacramento Street exactly a week ago. Everything else Blanche owns in the world is still there. Her apartment, her whole goddamn building; it’s her name on the deed. But she can’t go home, can she? Home is the last place in the world she should go if she means to stay alive another day.
She checks the bottom of the bag. Her fingers meet a bottle. A diaper. A beloved black doorknob.
Blanche stares at them with prickling eyes. She was forgetting P’tit. How—
Because I’ve been shot at, she wants to scream. Because I’ve been caked with my friend’s blood. Of course Blanche has never really forgotten her son. All week, since she found the macs gone from the apartment, and P’tit with them, she’s been looking for the baby, fretting over him, waiting for the moment she’ll get him back safe. Right now she’s just preoccupied with staying alive.
The word, like a fist in the face. Alive.
Blanche crouches on the dusty ground. Not sorrow, exactly, more like a weight, a cartwheel rolling across her chest and coming to a stop. A sense of her own stupidity so overwhelming that she can’t draw a breath. Because what reason has she to believe that Arthur hasn’t done away with the baby too?
Think it through, she orders herself. With a crazy sort of logic, like Arthur’s. Say that he somehow discovered where Blanche was hiding. He bought or borrowed a shotgun and set out for San Miguel Station yesterday evening. What would he have done with the baby? Left him with Ernest? No; Ernest can’t stand P’tit’s caterwauling. Would Arthur have hired some neighbor or one of their old lodgers to keep an eye on P’tit while Papa was off murdering Maman?
Blanche would like to believe that. She really would. Even if she never sees P’tit again, if she could believe him alive and well …
But P’tit’s his own son!
He’s always been Arthur’s, Blanche reminds herself, but that hasn’t meant Arthur’s been particularly interested in the baby’s welfare, or even his existence. After having P’tit on his hands for a whole week, Arthur could well have worked up a wave of bitterness big enough to extinguish any last trace of parental feeling. After all, if Arthur’s capable of firing through a window at the women he’s claimed to love for nine years, then he must be equally capable of ridding himself of the inconvenient burden of P’tit. It would be so much easier than killing a woman. A one-year-old who can barely sit, who hasn’t yet figured out how to crawl, let alone walk or run … it wouldn’t even take a bullet.
No. Stop it. You don’t know. So don’t speculate.
She presses her last few bits of clean linen into the bag to block P’tit’s things from her view. Her face is slick with sweat. This weather must be about to break; how much heat and humidity can the air hold? “Then I was gayest of the gay—” Curse it, how does it go?
Jenny would know. Would have known, Blanche corrects herself. Hundreds of songs cached in that narrow head; thousands, maybe.
A quick squint at her face in her tiny mirror tells Blanche that she can’t do much except rub Jenny’s blood off it with the smeary rag. Don’t dwell on it. Blood’s just blood, isn’t that what Jenny told old Maria? The tiny cut on Blanche’s right cheek from the window glass has formed a little scab already; how fast the living body tidies itself up. She pulls her lank brown hair into a knot, nets it, and stabs it with half a dozen pins.
Snap goes the clasp of her carpetbag. Blanche gathers her stained clothes into a bundle with shaking fingers.
The tune finally comes to her in a rush: one of Jenny’s. Delivered with a stage frown, but a smirk behind it, and a few syncopated steps.
Life was a rosy dream I vow,
It seems a horrid nightmare now!
Then I was gayest of the gay,
But I have got the blues today.
Blanche puts up her parasol with a click of steel. The green silk blocks the worst of the light. Emerging from behind the hanging sheet with the rank bundle of clothes gripped and held at arm’s length, she stares around for anywhere to dispose of it.
Near the pond, a tiny bonfire sends up its smoky flag. A small child beside it. As Blanche gets closer, she sees it’s John Jr. With dry eyes he blinks up at her from where he squats. One hand is tucked into his belt, the hurt shoulder held high.
Paper flares and blackens: an old volume that says Ragged Dick, something about A Bad Boy … John Jr. leans in to stir up the fire with a long stick. Blanche recognizes the green and gold binding of Around the World in Eighty Days. “What are you burning her books for?” she demands.
“She gave them to me,” he sobs.
Well, it’s as good a way of grieving as any, Blanche supposes, even if there is something heathen about it. Jenny would have done the same. If things had gone the other way last night—if it were Blanche who’d met Arthur’s bullets with her body—then Jenny would probably be chucking not just Blanche’s clothes but every trace of her on a bonfire this morning.
“May I—” She gestures with the bundle instead of speaking the words.
His face turns puce. One of these boys caught in the quicksand of puberty who’re mortified by everything to do with the opposite sex, Blanche decides. Ignorant about the whole business, trapped here with no girls to ogle except his big sister; the less he knows, the more his imagination bulges. A handshake from a farmer’s wife could probably make this lad hard, let alone the sight of the underclothes of a genuine Parisian burlesque dancer. Not that he’s likely to be aware of exactly how Miss Blanche earns her daily bread, but instinct always trumps knowledge.
There’s a mongrel beside her, sniffing at the bloodstained folds excitedly. She kicks at it.
John Jr. leaps up so fast Blanche is startled into taking a step backward. But the boy’s seizing the clothes with one arm, pressing the whole foul mass of them to his chest. Blanche is ludicrously embarrassed that a stripling of twelve is handling her petticoats.
He tosses the lot onto the fire. Foul smoke billows and for a moment she thinks the clothes have suffocated the flames. Then John Jr. pokes the fire with his stick and it begins to lick busily again.
Blanche stands as stiff as a fashion plate and keeps her eyes north on the distant hills that cut San Miguel Station off from the City proper. She’s gripping the wooden handle of her parasol, she finds, as if its spindly frame and thin dome of silk might somehow lift her out of here. “Thank you,” she says, so hoarsely that she’s not sure the boy can even hear her over the crackle of the flames.
With no warning, he flings himself against Blanche, his head on her chest, so hard she can feel a button dig into her sternum, and his good arm pulls her tight. For all the clumsiness of his embrace, John Jr. is the only one in this derelict hamlet who seems to give a rat’s ass about Blanche. So she hugs him back.
His words are muffled.
“What?” she says, pulling away.
“It’s all right, Miss Blanche.” The boy’s slate eyes are raging with misery. “Going to be all right now.”
An odd phrase; a remark some lost-for-words adult would make. “Oh, I doubt that,” murmurs Blanche, and staggers away toward the Eight Mile House.
Strange: the bicycle isn’t where she saw it last, tucked behind some dried-up bushes at the side of the building. What would have made Jenny move her high-wheeler yesterday? Blanche’s eyes interrogate the desiccated leaves. The porch has a gnawed-looking patch just under the shattered front, she notices. Was that always there? The window’s not a window anymore; it’s a ragged eye socket.
It occurs to Blanche only now that Arthur might have had Ernest with him. Must have had, in fact; what does Arthur ever embark on without the help of his familiar, his boon companion, his comrade in pleasure and trouble?
What would they have said to each other, these two men, creeping into San Miguel Station in the dark? She pictures Arthur as he was a week ago, elegant and snide at a faro table. Would he have ranted, abused Blanche, justified his bloody plan in a whisper as he and Ernest edged along the side of the Eight Mile House? No, Arthur wouldn’t have needed to say a word. Ernest, his longtime catcher on the high trapeze, would follow his old flier—his old master—anywhere.
Looking back down the years, Blanche glimpses the tiny seedling of resentment Ernest must have been nursing from the moment he laid eyes on her. At the stage door of the Cirque d’Hiver, he was only a knock-kneed trapeze apprentice and she was the milky-skinned girl who caught and held the gaze of his beloved mentor. When Ernest shot up into a muscular young man, long-limbed enough to replace Arthur’s old partner in the catch trap—because the catcher has to be tall—the two friends and Blanche carried on living in one another’s pockets. And really, over the nearly ten years they’ve spent together, knocking about in Paris and then in San Francisco, has Ernest ever thought Blanche good enough for Arthur? Hasn’t there always been a jagged edge to his joking? And this summer, hasn’t he come to hate her just as much as Arthur has, on his own behalf as much as Arthur’s? Four days ago on Waverly Place, Ernest seized her by the jaw and called her an infernal whore. No, Blanche decides, he wouldn’t have needed any persuasion to help Arthur pay back every slight, to rid the world of Blanche Beunon once and for all.
There’s a wagon outside the Eight Mile House, she notices with a jolt. Too clean to belong to a local.
Don’t be ridiculous, Blanche scolds herself, why would the macs come back to shoot her in broad daylight, and with a wagon?
She walks back into the saloon and has to stop her eyes from turning to the left, toward the front bedroom. A coffin sits on the exploded remains of the mattress. A plain wooden box, all angles, no handles, no ornaments. Two strangers in rubber aprons are draping a muslin sheet in it. The floor and walls are still dark with blood and pocked with the occasional hole. The baize blind hanging off its nail in the window has a missing corner with blackened edges. Jenny’s body must still be there, hidden by the bed.
“No, twelve hours is worse than six any day,” the thick-chested man is insisting. “Stiff as the proverbial.”
“Daresay you’re right,” murmurs the older one, who has soft white sideburns.
“Of course I am. Going to take any amount of massaging to—”
“Miss,” says the elder, loud enough to alert his colleague.
The barrel-chested one, not discomfited at Blanche overhearing them, nods at her. “You’ll be the other party?” He waits. “Travel companion of the deceased?”
She manages to nod and concentrates on shutting her parasol so the green silk pleats smoothly.
“Coroner’s deputy,” the man says, introducing himself, “and assistant”—nodding at the older man. “The dieners will need to know what to put her in.”
“Attendants in the deadhouse, don’t you know.”
Blanche stares at the coffin. But what’s that for, if not for putting Jenny in?
“What the deceased will wear,” he spells out, “when formalities are complete.”
She’s troubled by a vision of a ball with everyone in formal dress. “What do the, the dieners usually …”
The coroner’s deputy rubs his hands on his smeared apron. “Well, there’s day wear, or night.”
“For a trip, see, or a long sleep, depending how you look at it,” murmurs the assistant.
“She came in this getup?” the deputy asks Blanche, pointing in a gingerly way at the pile of clothes on the bureau with the Colt resting on top.
She gathers her strength to say yes, to tell them to put Jenny back in the clothes she chose for herself. The worn gray jacket, the baggy trousers tide-marked with the mud of Sweeney Ridge … what could possibly be criminal about them now? Rags, but they must have been some kind of treasure to Jenny for her to have gone through so much for them and still keep pulling them back on every morning, year after year.
Then Blanche’s eye focuses on a fold of fabric: Jenny’s shirt. Not quite unrecognizably dirty; the vine pattern flickers through the pall of dust. The shirt of Arthur’s that Blanche picked out to lend to the crazy bicyclist that early morning in the middle of August. “No.”
“She came in something else?” asks the deputy.
Blanche shakes her head. “I mean no, she can’t wear those.” Can’t be buried in her killer’s shirt.
“Wouldn’t be proper,” he agrees with a prim sigh. “No luggage other than the satchel …”
“No shoes neither,” frets the assistant.
“Her boots are under the bed, right at the back,” says Blanche.
They all look at the wine-dark floor. Neither man gets down on his knees.
“We’ll have them lay her out in a nightshirt, then,” says the coroner’s deputy.
“But—” Blanche tries not to picture the punctured, soaked rag still on Jenny. McNamara’s spare nightshirt, which his wife lent Jenny their first night here. Just three days ago.
“He means a special one for burial,” the man with the sideburns murmurs, “furnished out of the autopsy budget.”
Blanche knows he’s being kind, but she thinks she may be sick. She stumbles out of the room, lets the door slam behind her.
The clock’s been reset and wound again, she notices. She watches the seconds go by.
No sign of the cops yet. Not that Blanche has any love for the authorities, but this is murder, goddamn it. San Miguel Station only feels like the back of beyond. It’s no more than twenty minutes by train from the downtown terminus of the Southern Pacific at Third and Townsend. Pretty quick by road too; Jenny whizzed out here on her bicycle on Tuesday, swerving around the ruts. (Where can that wretched bicycle have got to?) And the City detectives must have their own carriage, it occurs to Blanche. What could possibly be taking them this long? She rests her head on the sticky pine of the bar.
“Miss Buneau?”
She jerks, suddenly aware that she’s been dozing. Buneau? Does this American mean her?
“My condolences. Vous comprenez?” He can’t be police: slight, even paler than her, with glasses tinted dark blue. His straw hair stays damply behind his ears as he lifts off his vast brimmed hat. “Cartwright’s my name, Cartwright of the Chronicle.”
“And my name is Beunon.” Pronouncing it as crisply as some Parisian matron.
“Pardon me, I was told Buneau,” says Cartwright, lifting his notebook almost to his face as he jots down the correction. “I’m getting up a piece about Jenny for the afternoon edition.”
Blanche balks at the forename. “You two were acquainted?”
“Not in person,” admits Cartwright. “But the Chronicle’s been covering her for a few years now. She was twenty-four or thereabouts, am I right?”
“She’s—” Blanche swallows hard to steady her voice. “She was twenty-seven.” In three more years, Blanche will be twenty-seven, too, but Jenny won’t be a day older; Jenny won’t be anything.
“She was mighty popular with our readers.”
“She’s not a character out of a serial,” spits Blanche. She gets to her feet and the room spins around her.
Cartwright puts a damp hand on her arm. She flicks it off. “You could help me get the facts right, at least,” he suggests.
“Help you? Who’s helping me?” Blanche’s voice swoops up, way up. “My friend gets blown to pieces last night and the police don’t even bother showing up this morning—”
“That’s disgraceful.” Another pencil mark in the little notebook.
The creak of a hinge from the bedroom. The coroner’s men carry the coffin out. Jenny’s old satchel riding on the lid, the long nose of her equalizer sticking out of it.
Anyone can load and fire it, easy, remarks Jenny in her head.
If ever Blanche needed protection … “Could I keep the Colt?” she asks them.
They halt. “‘All personal property to be collected, recorded, and transferred to the City treasurer until the estate is settled,’” quotes the deputy. “Was she intestate?”
“Pardon?”
“Did she fail to leave a valid will?”
Blanche’s mouth twists. She’d be surprised if Jenny had even let herself be counted in the census.
“We’ll be searching her lodging, miss, if you can provide an address,” says his assistant.
“She doesn’t—she didn’t have one.”
Cartwright scribbles that down.
The men exchange a resigned look and shuffle toward the door like a pair of footsore dancers.
Blanche is left in the saloon with the reporter. The heat, she groans silently. Jenny will be ripe by the time they reach the City. Have they ice in the wagon, at least?
“The City detectives do seem a little slow off the mark this morning, but they’re the nation’s finest, I assure you. Captain Lees is a genuine genius,” Cartwright says soothingly.
She forces her eyes back to the pale newsman’s.
“Mug books of every suspicious character in California, a laboratory for scrutinizing clues … I’ve known him to make a case on the tip of a boot print!”
Blanche nods, to shut him up.
“Another scorcher,” he remarks, glancing toward the azure sky framed in the dirty window. He disappears behind the bar, comes back after a minute with a brown jug.
She remembers the song: “Little brown jug,” don’t I love thee. “Don’t assume I’m a dipso,” snaps Blanche.
“It’s water,” he assures her, filling two glasses and sitting down.
She sips at the stale stuff and wishes she’d asked for cognac. The fellow’s spectacles are distracting her, the heavy blue double Ds and side lenses boxing his eyes in. “Can you take those things off?”
Cartwright removes the glasses and folds the straight arms with a click. His eyes blink at her, watery blue, an unguarded quiver to the sparse lashes.
“You’re—in France, we say albino?”
The man rubs between his blond eyebrows as if he’s got a headache. “From your excellent English I deduce you’ve been here long enough to remark on the general relish for the strange?”
“Take the craze for collecting postcards of rarities, or laughing right in the unfortunates’ faces at the dime museum,” he comments drily. “So you’ll understand if I’d rather not hang any particular label around my neck.” He fits his glasses on again. The skin of his ear is fine-veined, pink where the sun shines through.
Against her will, Blanche remembers P’tit: his small ears ablaze with light. Her voice comes out in a snarl. “I understand that you’d rather be the barker of the freaks than one of them. ‘Roll up, roll up, come see the trouser-wearing miss lying in her gore!’”
“Your anger does you credit, Miss Beunon,” says Cartwright, “except that I ain’t the proper target. You want a noose for the man who shot your friend? Somebody out there knows his name, and—”
“I know his goddamn name!”
The translucent eyebrows shoot up.
It feels as if a pit has opened up at her feet. Danger, pungent on the air. But Arthur wants to kill her, has already tried to kill her; what’s there to lose?
P’tit. That’s all that keeps Blanche from speaking up. The awful uncertainty. The ghostly blur that’s all she can see when she tries to picture P’tit this morning, somewhere in the City. The thought that her son—if he’s still alive—might be with these appalling men, his survival dependent on their whim. If she names them as Jenny’s killers, is it P’tit who’ll suffer?
And yet P’tit’s most likely to be saved if the authorities hunt down his father right away. So what the hell is Blanche waiting for?
None of this makes any sense.
“Deneve,” she says very fast, before she can change her mind. “Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve.”
Cartwright writes it down. “You actually saw him last night?”
She shakes her head. “He’s my—” Hard to choose a word. The terms in English all sound dirty. Working folk in Paris generally don’t bother with weddings, and Arthur always sneered at marriage anyhow, calling it disinfected love. “He used to be my man.”
“When did he leave you?”
Her eyes narrow.
“Beg pardon,” says Cartwright smoothly, “I mean vice versa.”
“He and his friend Ernest Girard, they’ve been making murderous threats—”
That’s when boots thump on the porch, and detectives file through the door. In plain clothes, but with that thick-necked police look about them that makes Blanche’s hackles rise.
“Cartwright,” says the leader, “are you trying to do my job again?”
“Ah, Mr. Bohen. I’m just preparing the way, like John the Baptist for Our Lord. This weather must be keeping you busy,” remarks the journalist, jumping up and putting his notebook away.
“We’re always busy,” Bohen corrects him. “Guns mean corpses, and since the war, every fool in America seems to own a firearm. But these hot nights do make matters worse.”
The celebrated Captain Lees is on vacation, it turns out. Bohen is his second in command. He insists on referring to Jenny as Jeanne Bonnet because that’s the name of record. He mangles Blanche’s surname, of course.
“Beunon, with an n,” she tells him frostily. “Two n’s,” she corrects herself, “the second one said in the nose.”
“Point taken, Miss Beunon,” honks Bohen with a hint of satire.
He sets his men to taking measurements. Cartwright hovers helpfully. “This entire case has been botched from the first,” Bohen complains to him. “No proper search of the settlement last night—the porch was stampeded over, the windowsill pawed to a high polish, bullets clawed out of walls! The landlord seems to have wasted several hours drowning his sorrows before bothering to inform us—”
“And then you took even longer to turn up,” says Blanche under her breath.
“There seemed no urgency in a case of presumed suicide,” Bohen snaps back.
She gapes at him. Jenny Bonnet shot dead. That curt wording was Blanche’s suggestion, she remembers now; she can see how the detectives jumped to the wrong conclusion.
“San Franciscans kill themselves all the time,” he points out, “and this notorious individual—”
“Notorious for wearing pants,” Blanche objects, “not for trying to kill herself.”
“Well, for your information, there’s a previous attempt on file.”
Cartwright’s notebook is up near his eyes again as he jots that down.
On file in the police station where Jenny was dragged in and charged for wearing pants over and over? A libel set down by her persecutors? Blanche doesn’t believe a word of it.
Detective Bohen is peering out through the dingy window now. “These isolated roadhouses … a creeping fungus around the edge of the City.”
“It’s from the City that Arthur came last night and shot her,” Blanche cuts in.
The detective stares.
Cartwright flips back a page in his notes. “‘Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve,’” he reads crisply, “‘cast-off paramour.’”
“Of Bonnet’s?” Bohen asks.
“Of mine,” says Blanche.
“Your mac?”
Her mouth hardens. What if Blanche is a dove—does that mean her testimony doesn’t count? “I don’t care what you call it. Arthur took—” A baby, she wants to say. His baby. Our baby. He took away my baby and I don’t know where or even if—But the story’s too complicated, too incongruous, too mortifying to speak out loud.
“This Deneve took something of yours?” Cartwright prompts her. “Valuables?”
The thread of Bohen’s patience snaps. “Good day, Mr. Cartwright.”
The journalist nods civilly, goes out onto the porch, and shuts the door behind him.
Bohen turns to Blanche, sits down next to her, and makes a peremptory gesture. “He took what?”
The fact is, she doesn’t know how to tell him about P’tit without making herself sound like a coldhearted bitch who deserved all she got. So she’ll stick to the point, which is murder. Blanche decides, all at once, not to muddy the waters by telling the detective that it would have been her who’d gotten shot if Arthur’s aim had been better. That’s not important, and she can’t prove it; all that matters is who killed Jenny. She must focus all her efforts on convincing Bohen that it was Arthur. “He took … he took offense at my breaking with him,” she says through her teeth, “and he thought Jenny an undesirable influence.”
It sounds feeble, unconvincing. An undesirable influence. Like the complaint of a schoolmistress.
The detective hasn’t written any of this down. He consults a little diagram. “The bullets must have passed very close to you.”
“They’d have killed me too if I hadn’t been bent over undoing my gaiter,” says Blanche, eager to release that much of the truth.
“According to Mrs. Holt,” murmurs Bohen as if to himself, “nobody got on or off any train at San Miguel Station last night. None of the residents heard horses either.”
She waves that aside. The macs must have slipped in somehow, maybe on foot. “He—Arthur and his friend Ernest, Ernest Girard—they’ve made the most bloodthirsty threats against us, against me and Jenny both—”
“Does Deneve own a shotgun?”
“Yes,” she lies, but a second too late to be convincing.
Bohen’s mouth purses. “You’d apprised him of the fact that you and Bonnet would be lodging down here?”
She chews her lip. “He must have found it out somehow. How else could he have tracked us down and shot Jenny?”
“Why is female reasoning so circular?” Bohen asks of the ceiling.
Resentment makes Blanche flush. But she’s distracted by a thought: Madame Johanna. The Prussian was the only one who knew where Blanche was going. Could Arthur possibly have browbeaten—no, Madame’s more than a match for him, but could he somehow have charmed her into letting slip where Blanche had gone?
“Another problem,” says Bohen heavily, not looking up from his notes. “According to Mrs. Holt, the dogs didn’t bark until after the gunshots. Those curs should have gone wild as soon as a stranger came within sniffing distance.”
That stumps Blanche.
He lets his notebook drop shut.
“You don’t mean to do a thing, do you?” asks Blanche. “No surprise! You’re the ones who nicked her over and over for a crime so petty it shouldn’t even be on the books …”
A small snort. “You’re thinking of patrolmen on the beat,” says Bohen, getting to his feet. “We City detectives are an elite force, with more important things to worry about than what folks wear.”
Nothing trivial about clothes, isn’t that what Arthur said the night they met Jenny?
“No known address,” he murmurs. “Where did she keep the rest of her possessions?”
Blanche is about to mention the missing bicycle, then realizes it might lead to questions about how Jenny acquired it in the first place. If he thinks of Jenny as a thief, will he take even less trouble to solve her murder? “She preferred to travel light” is all she says.
“The remains are on their way to Gray’s Undertakers, on Dupont,” he says. “Be at the inquest Saturday—that’s tomorrow—ten o’clock. Coroner Swan insists on punctuality.”
“But Arthur and Ernest, they’re lodging at my house on Sacramento Street,” says Blanche with an urgent gesture northward. “If you hurry—”
“Your job’s not to tell me mine, Miss Beunon,” says Bohen. “It’s to describe what you know to a jury.”
After the police go, Blanche finds the McNamaras over at Jordan’s letting the man from the Chronicle stand them to brandies.
“But I haven’t seen him since yesterday,” John is saying.
“Louis? He’s away to San Jose,” Ellen reminds him.
The newsman is taking notes.
“Then there’s a couple of Prussians in a shack to the west a bit,” says John. “I can never get their names straight …”
Nobody offers Blanche a drink. Gloom settles on her as she listens. Cartwright does seem industrious, but he’s not going to see justice done by charting every outlying inhabitant of San Miguel Station. Well, if the police won’t listen to her, perhaps the jury at this inquest tomorrow will.
“I’ll be on my way now,” she interrupts them, with a nod to the group.
Mrs. McNamara wipes one eye and asks, “What about the room?”
Blanche frowns, puzzled.
“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—that’s three dollars.”
“Ah, now, Ellen.” Her husband sighs.
“It’s not as if she can’t afford it …”
This bitch is trying to shame me. Wrath revives Blanche; her pulse bangs to life. “When you rent me a room in which I can sleep without being shot at, I’ll be delighted to pay. And since we’re on the subject of money, where’s Jenny’s high-wheeler?”
“What’s that?” asks Cartwright, pencil poised.
“Her bicycle. It’s worth a fortune, and somebody’s pinched it.” Blanche mentioned it just to put the McNamaras on the back foot, but as she watches them exchange a dull stare, she begins to wonder. Perhaps at some point in the long misery of the night it had occurred to one of the pair that Jenny wouldn’t be needing the machine any longer? Some compensation for their trouble? “She left it behind the bushes, right beside your lousy shack,” Blanche presses on. Had the parents sent Mary Jane out before sunrise to stash the bicycle in some abandoned outhouse? Would they wait a few weeks and then lead it into the City to sell?
“Nobody’s laid a hand on anything,” protests John McNamara.
“What call have you to be making accusations when it’s probably the murderer that took it?” Ellen moans. And then, after another sip: “If it’s all that valuable—it might have been for the machine that she was slaughtered, I suppose.”
Behind those bleary blue eyes, is that a glint? Blanche’s stomach turns. Could Ellen be blaming her own crime on an imaginary stranger? Two hundred dollars would be a fortune indeed for this pitiful family. Could McNamara have crept out on his own porch last night, at his wife’s urging, and shot Jenny through the window for the sake of her high-wheeler?
Ridiculous.
But is it? Folks get done to death for money every day of the week.
No. Quite absurd. If the McNamaras had coveted the high-wheeler, couldn’t they simply have hidden it in a hay bale and claimed to know nothing about it until Jenny got tired of searching? They wouldn’t have needed to bring the City detective force down on their heads by committing a murder. Besides, Blanche doubts this pair would have the intelligence and energy for theft, even. They can barely manage to feed their children.
No, the real reason it’s absurd to try to pin Jenny’s killing on this potato-faced family is that Blanche knows it was Arthur. Only his rage, only his vindictive malignity, only his need to punish her, could explain the horror of last night.
“If the yoke does turn up, we’ll send it straight to Sosthenes, of course,” says McNamara.
“Who’s that?” asks Cartwright.
“Her father, over in Oakland.”
Blanche stares. Jenny still had family in this part of the world?
“Sosthenes Bonnet, this would be?” Cartwright’s gesturing to Phil Jordan to refill the four stubby glasses.
“He and the missus were bright stars back in the Rush. Comedy, tragedy, opera, the whole shebang.” McNamara sighs into his brandy. “Sosthenes pushes a mop in a barrelhouse now. Jenny takes the ferry across every month or two to slip him some cash—used to,” he corrects himself, fumbling a sign of the cross.
Jenny’s parents, musical actors? Blanche’s irritation surges. Her friend always implied she had no kin left, or none worth mentioning. Why would she have disowned a pair of former bright stars living close at hand by San Francisco Bay? Sometimes Blanche found Jenny to be a fascinating puzzle—but at other times, just damn mulish. Evading and prevaricating and equivocating just for the fun of it, even when there was nothing to hide.
Back in the destroyed front bedroom at the Eight Mile House, Blanche finds her straw hat in a drawer. She sets it forward on her head and lowers the limp lace, stares herself down in the mirror. She’s a woman with no man, no friend, no child.
As she turns to go, her foot catches the edge of something sticking out from under the bed.
Burlap. Jenny’s frog sack. Full of the creatures she caught up on Sweeney Ridge on Wednesday. Only a day and a half ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
Does Blanche’s eye detect a small movement? Surely not. How could these tiny hoppers live through what happened in this room last night?
On an impulse she doesn’t understand, Blanche grabs the sack by the neck; the dampened material is surprisingly heavy. She walks out the front door and around to the back of the Eight Mile House, carpetbag swinging on one elbow, frog sack held away from her skirts.
The small girl, Kate, is at the pond. Mud-colored hair pulled back in a punitive braid under a straw hat oddly like Blanche’s. What is she, eight? Nine? Waltzing with her one-armed cloth doll and whispering some Irish ballad.
Blanche struggles with the knotted burlap, abrading a finger on the rough cloth.
“What you doing, miss?” asks Kate.
“Letting some frogs out.”
“What for?”
She can’t think of an explanation. “To go back to their people, because I don’t want them.”
“Frogs ain’t people. Except if you mean Frenchies,” Kate adds confusedly.
“Clearly I don’t,” snaps Blanche, fighting with the knot. After a minute she adds, “Why do you call us that—Frogs?”
“Frenchies?” Kate furrows her forehead. “Because you eat frogs, I suppose.”
“We’re hardly the only ones.”
“Yeah, but you started it. And horses too,” the girl adds with a frown.
Blanche considers that. It’s true, in Paris she was raised not to be sentimental about food.
Out of the corner of her eye she spots the five-year-old, knock-kneed in the bulrushes. How long would it take Jeremiah’s soused parents to notice if he never came home from the pond? It occurs to Blanche that children expire every minute unless someone’s fighting to keep them alive: they sicken, suffocate, or burn. The odds against any one of them making it past a first birthday … “Shouldn’t you pull your little brother out of there before he drowns himself?” asks Blanche, too sharply.
“He knows all right,” says Kate.
The boy is squatting in the water now, slapping the green-scummed surface with pleasure.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Jenny’s high-wheeler?” asks Blanche.
Both children nod.
She’s excited. “Where?”
“Here, when she rode it,” says Jeremiah with a jerk of his head.
“No, I mean today? Have you seen it since she—”
The boy’s eyes are vacant. The girl shakes her head, and then her doll’s head. But then, thinks Blanche, her father and mother might have prepared Kate for that question; threatened her, to keep her mouth shut …
Oh, Blanche, let it go. She knows in her gut it wasn’t the McNamaras.
Blanche’s barely got the bag open before a biggish frog startles her by leaping through. She drops the sack. In ones and twos, the creatures spasm their way out. Some are only the length of her thumb, yet they’ve so much go in them, hurling themselves across the few feet of baked ground toward the water as if they can smell it.
“Can I’ve a few?” asks Kate with an expression Blanche belatedly recognizes as hungry.
“Help yourself,” says Blanche.
The little girl seizes a fat frog and smacks its head on a nearby rock. “Jenny said to bash ’em right away, or a knife to the neck, it’s only fair. Skinning them alive, that’s uncalled-for,” recites Kate. Her pocketknife out already.
Jeremiah picks up a hinged pair of legs and makes a jiggling puppet of them. “If you salt them, they dance by their selves,” he confides to Blanche.
She’s heard of that trick but never seen it. If she’s obliged to watch a five-year-old perform it this morning, the top of her head is going to explode.
Is that Cartwright’s wide sun hat outside the Canadian’s log cabin? This pallid mouse is thorough, Blanche has to grant him that; he clearly means to interrogate every living soul within sight of San Miguel Station. She almost pities the man for his wasted efforts in this heat. Perhaps she should tell him more about Arthur. Convince him to go up to town, to Sacramento Street, and ask around. Bohen wouldn’t listen to Blanche, but can’t an inquisitive newsman dig up evidence of guilt just as well as a so-called detective?
But here comes a puff of smoke on the railroad in the west. If Blanche stops to talk to Cartwright she’ll miss this train, and what if this is the last one heading into the City today? She mustn’t get stuck here for another night. So Blanche sets off at a run for the depot.
On the platform Mrs. Holt sits at her stall as if awaiting a horde of customers. Candies twisted into their dusty papers, misshapen apples, one incongruously bright orange … Blanche’s mouth waters and it occurs to her to buy it, but something makes her unwilling to carry away anything from San Miguel Station.
“Second class,” she says, raising her voice to be heard over the shriek of the incoming train. The engine belches out its bilious gray. She scrabbles for coins in her pocketbook. She can’t quite afford second, but she never travels third. She’ll need to get hold of some real cash soon, but she won’t worry about that now.
Nobody gets off the train. Blanche heaves her carpetbag ahead of her into the brightly painted carriage. She drops onto a two-person seat, spreads her skirt across the thin cushion to repel any man who might think of sharing it with her. She examines her boots, rubs off the worst of the dust on the aisle carpet. Breathes in the stink of coal, watching the small litter of buildings shrink behind her. Removes a bit of smut from her eye, and San Miguel Station’s gone.
Back in the middle of August. When Jenny Bonnet heads off across the City in the green shirt Arthur’s lent her that humid Sunday morning, the other three fall into their beds.
Blanche wakes hours later, twisted in her nightgown with a head that’s pounding worse than her bashed-up leg, sun stabbing her in the eye. (Arthur claims it would be intolerably bourgeois to hang curtains. He and Blanche have squabbled over it just about every morning since the heat wave began.)
Her dream comes back to her now, an endless loop from last night’s conversation about the photograph. What’s wrong with your baby?
Nothing.
What kind of farm?
It’s for his health.
What’s wrong with him?
Beside her lies Arthur, very still, his cheek marble. Tiny black hairs thrusting through perfect pores: a forest sprung up overnight. Blanche should keep gazing at her naked fancy man instead of brooding over some stranger’s nosy questions.
Will Arthur mind if she wakes him up? Not if she does it right. Not if her hand takes its time snaking through the crumpled sheets.
Her eye falls on the little carte de visite in its frame. So much of the baby’s swaddled, it’s hard to get a sense of his face from it. Two weeks old, three? She remembers carrying P’tit up a flight of stairs to her Scottish lodgers’ studio. Blanche was feeling almost enthusiastic that day; not yet too exhausted, because P’tit slept a lot. They may not have welcomed the news of a child, she and Arthur, but they had good intentions, didn’t they? They meant to make room for the little stranger in their life somehow, to carry the metamorphosis off with grace. Family life, bohemian-style. But everything changed a little while after that photograph, when P’tit got hungrier and began to gnaw Blanche, and her breast swelled monstrously, the fever making her loco …
So who was that jailbird to interrogate Blanche about having him nursed out, anyhow? To make her feel negligent for not having inspected the Hoffmans’ farm inch by inch, and obscurely guilty for not keeping P’tit at home in Chinatown!
On his visits to her, at the House of Mirrors, he’s always so … limp. Blanche has a private uneasiness—so private that she’s never spoken it aloud—that he may have been born a little lacking. That perhaps all those things she did with all those michetons while she was carrying P’tit inside her did some obscure damage. But surely someone would have mentioned it, if so—the midwife, Madame, Arthur, the uniformed nurse who brings him into town once a month; somebody would have told Blanche if he was defective. So, then, the way P’tit is must be the way babies are.
She shakes her head to banish these gloomy thoughts. And begins to sing, very faintly, to get herself back in a lewd mood, that melody that was on every woman’s lips when Blanche, Arthur, and Ernest left France, and when they stepped off the Utopia on the other side of the ocean. “‘Voici la fin de la semaine—’” It’s the weekend, and the lady’s looking for love wherever she can find it. The lines prowl up and down, feline.
I’ll love whoever loves me, and why not? Looking down at herself this morning, as she slides closer to her sleeping man, Blanche is grateful for her white sleekness; inside her nightgown, hip and belly and breast are seal-plump and ageless. When her clothes are off, who’d know she’s twenty-four? She murmurs on:
Qui veut mon âme?
Elle est à prendre.
Who wants me should take me, the singer urges.
Blanche finds Arthur’s sleep-swollen cigare with her hand, then with her lips, casting the lightest of spells. As cocks go, it’s not particularly long, but it’s the thickest she’s ever encountered. She could have him jammed inside her before he even knows it. She did that all the time when she was pregnant—desperate, night, noon, and morning, and Arthur liked her that way. If you have an itch, why not scratch it?
And surely Blanche has got the right. Doesn’t she treat her mac well, lavish gifts on him, fund every scheme he dreams up? Arthur’s still asleep, but who could object to waking this way, up to the hilt in a woman’s mouth as if some dirty dream has come true? Besides, what better cure for a sore head …
“Putain,” Arthur swears under his breath, eyes suddenly wide, and he smiles, because what man wouldn’t? And what woman wouldn’t be glad to make him smile that way with every trick her grappling tongue can invent?
It’s the slight movement of the sticky air that lets her know the door of the bedroom has opened. Blanche is only half surprised when she notices Arthur’s eyes fixed over her shoulder: that luxurious look of watching himself being watched. The expression he used to wear on the platform, standing very erect, waiting to catch the fly bar.
“Don’t let me interrupt, mon vieux” comes Ernest’s voice, half yawning, from the doorway.
And from this position Blanche can’t see if Arthur’s beckoned to his young friend or if Ernest has simply walked in or if Blanche could even be said to have invited him, by a wriggle, if ever so slight, or by simply not protesting, because her mouth is full, after all. “You don’t mind, chérie,” Arthur murmurs, his damp hand coiling her hair, not a question but a statement, a reminder, a reassurance, because why would Blanche mind being looked at from any angle? The lovely motion of her hips under white cotton, the dip and duck and bend of her head … Blanche la Danseuse, known for movements so beautifully obscene that customers spill down Sacramento Street boasting of the banknotes they’ve thrown under her smooth heels.
So she says nothing, does nothing but carry on doing what she does best as Arthur starts to groan. Isn’t she his, hasn’t she always been Arthur’s? And what’s Arthur’s is Ernest’s, because that’s the kind of man Arthur is: generous to a fault. He’s never cared about the stupid michetons who lavish their cash on Blanche, and in return she doesn’t care—well, doesn’t much care—about other women. The possibility of other women, that is, because she doesn’t know of any in particular. But a man so handsome—there must occasionally be other women, no? Arthur would never rub her face in it. He has manners. It’s all part and parcel of being a free spirit, because if love isn’t free, then, as Arthur says, it’s just goddamn marriage without the name.
Ernest is a watcher; sometimes that’s all he requires. But not today. When Blanche feels the younger man’s fingers sliding the nightgown up over her hips, does she mind? That’s the curious thing: sometimes you object and sometimes you don’t and sometimes you crave it so much it makes you sick. Right now, for instance, Blanche can’t tell whether she wants Arthur’s friend. Their friend, she supposes, though never exactly her friend. Ernest is an ape below the line on his neck where his razor stops—one black swoop from shoulders to shins. The pelt ages him, so no one would guess he’s only twenty-one. Blanche can’t see him right now, can’t see anything but the pale swoop of Arthur’s belly, a little softer than it used to be when he was young. She mustn’t get pregnant again, she really mustn’t. Her little box of carbolic plugs in the bureau. “Wait,” she says, “I ain’t—”
“Prends-la dans le cul,” he murmurs to Ernest, playing her nipples the way he might the strings of a guitar.
So Ernest does. It blurs Blanche’s senses, the gentleness on her breasts and the hard insistence at her ass. Confusion swindles her into sensation. Qu’importe; whether or not she wants Arthur and Ernest to take her at both ends hardly matters at this point. The trampling on her will rather excites her; her body likes having its mind made up for it. So she gasps, letting Ernest in.
The rhythmic friction between desire and disgust; Blanche knows that from the little stage at the House of Mirrors where she doles it out Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Right now she’s panting and aching, her jaw crammed to bursting with Arthur’s hot girth, her wrists taking her weight as Ernest speeds up the terrible pressure deep inside her, but she knows there is in fact no limit to what she can take. Blanche is the conduit, the river, the rope, the electrical current. They’re fucking right through her, the smooth man and the hairy man, and she’s going to drink down every drop they’ve got, their spill one unbroken seam of gold through the shattering rock.