Sunday’s payday at the House of Mirrors, so Blanche strolls down the block to the bordel that afternoon in mid-August. A new red-and-white costume, but no jewelry, because she’s always dressed so eye-catchingly that she needs none. Arthur’s the magpie of the two of them, his fob always thick with baubles; like most men of the sporting set, he prefers to wear his gold.
She pauses to listen to a harpist pluck out a serenade. Her right leg is aching from last night’s collision with Jenny Bonnet’s high-wheeler, and the rest of her still throbs in a better way from what she and Arthur and Ernest got up to this morning.
Parasols and umbrellas form a flotilla along Sacramento Street, silk shields held up against the merciless flood of light. A general air of dishevelment, businessmen in shirtsleeves, women half bare and mopping at themselves with handkerchiefs. Every store Blanche passes is crammed with loiterers who’ll stay in there as long as the shop boys will let them; every bar filled with whoever can afford a drink an hour.
Madame Johanna’s Italianate mansion is angel blue, with snowy paintwork; the epitome of taste. The porter’s muscle-bound in his cyan livery. He’s said to be Dutch, though Blanche has never heard a word out of him, nor out of the black maid who brings her downstairs to Madame’s private parlor. Blanche once teased Madame about hiring mutes, but Madame told her that all of the servants came fully equipped; they just knew how to hold their tongues.
The parlor walls are a muted lavender. This could be a visiting room in a well-endowed convent instead of the City’s most notorious brothel. Bookcases bulwark the walls, heavy with volumes in German, French, English. The carpet is primly patterned with lozenges—so unlike the red-tufted extravaganza in the Grand Saloon upstairs. Blanche can hear the Professor there now, practicing a crowd-pleaser at top speed, with too much pedal.
The proprietor sits at her desk, in ashy silk as always, with colorless hair as sleek as plaster; she could be any age at all. Madame holds up one finger to make Blanche wait. “‘Reduced rates for parties from out of town,’” she murmurs, finishing her copperplate-script sentence, then lifting the page to check the carbon paper.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get up your circulars on a typewriter?” Blanche wonders.
“Ah, but our visitors appreciate the personal touch.” Madame sets down her pen, lets her little glasses drop on their gold chain, and stands up to kiss Blanche lightly on both cheeks. “Who’d have thought this business would require so much paperwork?”
Blanche picks up a cabinet card from a stack of photographs beside the envelopes: a girl with heavily kohled eyes, bare limbs sliding out of Moorish draperies. “Sal’s too skinny for Eastern,” she comments. “Those matchstick legs!”
“She’s got a notion to try a number with fringed tights and a hat in the shape of a horse’s head,” mentions Madame.
Blanche cackles. She chooses an overstuffed chair. She thinks back to her eight years at the Cirque d’Hiver: at least there the horses were real, even if the pay was much lower than what she makes at the House of Mirrors.
“Well, variety’s the main thing. Though Madame Bertha is still stuffing all her girls into frilly white nightgowns,” Madame Johanna adds, jerking her head contemptuously in the direction of the rival brothel down the street, “presumably to disguise the fact that half of them are over twenty.”
Is that a jibe at Blanche’s age? She counterattacks: “Have you any auctions coming up?”
“Oh yes,” says Madame, pretending not to register the barbed tone, and she reads from her circular:
The House of Mirrors is celebrated not only for the range of delights on offer but for their utmost freshness, notably on the first Friday of every month.
“Does it ever stick in your craw?” asks Blanche.
Madame’s gaze is saintly. “Just because bidders may fancy that a girl is nine years old does not mean that’s the case.”
Blanche grimaces, picturing Madame’s supplier; she’s met the man only once, in a corridor upstairs, but that was enough to give her the creeps. “It doesn’t mean she’s fourteen either.”
“Since to consent—legally—she must be ten, logically she must be that, at least.”
“Logically! Anyhow, I bet your fellow’s notion of consent is a little bottle of laudanum,” says Blanche.
The Prussian shrugs her shoulders as if they’re stiff. “Well. You wouldn’t deny a girl her one chance to make a real killing? The fortunes some fools will throw down to stake a first claim, or to delude themselves that’s what they’re doing … The virgin trade should really be considered a way of milking money from mugs, rather like the forms of speculation on which the loafers of California spend their all. Or their lady friends’ all, of course.”
Blanche leans back in the chair and smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever come to pick up my wages without your managing to get in some dig at my fancy man.”
“True,” says Madame, “I’ve never quite grasped the point of Deneve. Talented on the trapeze once—I’ll take your word for that—but what can he do on the ground?”
The funny thing is, Arthur calls Madame the splendid Prussian; he has no idea that she holds him in contempt. “He did bring me here,” Blanche observes.
Meaning to America, but to the House of Mirrors too. Arthur brought her, watched, clapped the loudest. After a few weeks, it hadn’t seemed to Blanche so very much of a step to go from dancing to sitting in the laps of the richer customers, and from that to letting one take her to a hotel for five times what she earned from a leg show. Arthur had been so encouraging. Blanche was pregnant and in what he teasingly called an overheated state. The michetons didn’t object as her belly rounded; quite the contrary. It seemed to give some of them a perverse thrill.
“A stinking ship brought you here too,” murmurs Madame,” but you managed to walk away from that promptly. Strange how girls of other nationalities don’t seem to need these hangers-on. If they have pimps, the fellows take managerial roles, at least, whereas these French macs are the feeblest parasites.”
Blanche only smiles. Parasite? For almost a decade, Arthur’s been the soil she’s rooted in, the rock she grips, the water that revives her. What would this widow know about men and women in the real world, outside her little puppet theater of performers and watchers?
There’s no information to be had about the late Mr. Werner, so the parlor girls who live upstairs speculate that Madame Johanna poisoned him. She’s never been seen with anyone who could plausibly be a lover, so they joke that her chatte must have sealed up by now, the way an old wound scars over.
“Why keep one sponger, my dear,” Madame presses on, “when so many men pant at the prospect of keeping you? L’amant de Blanche, to name but one …”
Lamantia is the man’s real name, and his punning pseudonym for himself—L’amant de Blanche, “the lover of Blanche”—sets her teeth on edge. The Sicilian businessman, partner in a large concern on Market Street, insists on using the assumed name when he hires Blanche—as if spending a night with a showgirl is a cloak-and-dagger business! “For the last time,” Blanche snaps, “I don’t want a keeper.”
“But you have so very many friends to choose from, you could follow your whim …”
She can’t stand that euphemism for michetons either—friends, as if what she exchanges with these various merchants, railroad magnates, and other plutocrats bears any resemblance to friendship. “My whim has always been Arthur.”
“Well.” Madame throws up her bony hands. “You must be making a comfortable living from your rents in addition to what you earn here, if you can afford to keep such a pet.”
Blanche smooths her scarlet skirt instead of answering. She wishes she’d never boasted to Madame about buying number 815 in the first place. The woman makes a habit of knowing too much and using it.
“Two pets, rather, if we count Ernest Girard—a matched pair of pugs,” says Madame amusedly. “I imagine they take a great deal of feeding and grooming …”
This reminds Blanche, uncomfortably, of P’tit and of her new acquaintance’s digging for information about him last night. To get Madame off the subject of keepers, she says, “By the way, these Hoffmans who’re minding our P’tit Arthur …” Then she realizes she doesn’t know how to phrase the question. “Is it far enough outside the City to be safe, would you say? Is the air”—Blanche strains for the word—“salubrious?” It occurs to her only now that while she, Arthur, and Ernest all got their scratches the last time the smallpox hit Paris, the same isn’t true of P’tit. “No doubt they’ve vaccinated the babies.”
“No doubt.”
Blanche tries again. “Have the Hoffmans quite a few little ones in their care?”
The Prussian is looking into her cash box now; she licks a finger to count a stack of notes. “Children have such a relish for company, don’t they?”
Was that an answer? “Perhaps I should pay him a visit there,” Blanche says tentatively.
The widow purses her pale lips.
“I know it’s not our usual procedure, but these aren’t ordinary times.”
Madame Johanna shakes her head. “Frau Hoffman finds that parents disrupt the routines.”
Blanche bristles. Routines—that makes the place sound more like a school or a hospital than a home for babies. How many infants could there be, lodging with one family of farmers? Blanche supposes she should have looked into these details before, but at the end of each visit, she’s always been grateful to wave good-bye as the nurse totes her small burden away in his basket.
One of these days, of course, P’tit will be grown enough that everything will be different. He’ll sit up, or stand, finally stretch out his arms to Maman, ready to be carried back to Sacramento Street to see his Papa, and perhaps even to stay, when the time is right. “I’m just a touch anxious, because of the heat and the epidemic,” she tells Madame now.
“Naturally. But your little one’s very well.”
“How do you—”
“Frau Hoffman would have informed me if the case were otherwise.”
This is where Blanche should accept her hundred in worn notes, pull on her lace gloves, pick up her parasol, and say her merci. But there’s something veiled in the madam’s tone … “Where do they live, exactly?” asks Blanche.
A hiss of breath. “If you’re irrational enough to insist on putting the child at greater risk in order to set your mind at rest, I’ll have him brought here this very afternoon.”
“I just find it a little odd that you don’t seem to want me to see this farm.”
An elegant shrug of the silk-covered shoulders. “You’re a free woman. But I find it equally odd,” adds Madame with an implacable smile, “that you’re suddenly so curious after almost a year.”
Blanche is on her feet, knuckles on the carved bureau. “What’s the damn address?”
Madame Johanna seems to be weighing something. “Folsom,” she says at last.
Blanche has never heard of a village by that name. She stares. “Folsom Street?” That’s right downtown, in the Mission. She’s probably gone past the door a hundred times.
“I wonder how you picked up the impression it was outside the City?”
“You’ve always called it a farm. Whereabouts on Folsom?” demands Blanche.
“Sit down.” Madame sighs. “You’ve proved your point: underneath that famously snowy décolletage beats a mother’s heart. I’ll send for him this minute, if you like.”
Blanche sees red. “What number on Folsom?”
“Fourteen twenty-two.”
Blanche strides toward the door, then turns back to snatch her parasol and gloves.
“I always thought we understood each other,” murmurs Madame.
That August afternoon the air’s unbearable, chalky with dust. The harpist is still on his stool outside the House of Mirrors but struggling with a tune from some Verdi opera now. Squinting out from under the pinked edge of her ivory parasol, Blanche waits impatiently for a horsecar—but when it comes, there’s a boy hanging off the back whose pocks look moist. What’s he doing out of bed? Blanche shudders and turns away, looking for a cab instead. Realizing, only now, that she dashed off without getting her wages from Madame, as impulsive as some green girl.
The cabbie spots her wave and brakes at the last moment, so the sweating horse almost tramples her. The man doesn’t bother getting down. “Fourteen twenty-two Folsom,” Blanche calls up to him, climbing into the little carriage. She slams the door shut herself.
They pass a crumpled brown shape in the street being winched into a cart: the third dead horse Blanche has seen this week. In the endless heat, the hills of the City are breaking the poor hacks; no circus pony she had the handling of ever endured so much. Blanche wishes this driver would slow down before his own wild-eyed bay drops in the traces. A knot of Specials at one corner are jawing and smoking pipes rather than engaging in any law enforcement. The streets are emptier than usual, she notices, but the vast white pavilion built for the Industrial Exhibition in this national centennial year is still pulling in the crowds. Maybe folks just want to be out of the sun, even if it means they risk rubbing up against the sick.
The cab turns down Tenth Street, into the Mission, and the variety of pale faces strikes her: Italians, Irish, Prussians, all living cheek by jowl. Blanche rather dreads reaching her destination. Under what conditions has her son been living? If these Hoffmans aren’t farmers, what are they?
She spots a swarm of kids kneeling around an ice block that’s fallen from a cart, still bristling with straw. They’re all licking it. Children are said to be the most susceptible to infection. How could this neighborhood be any healthier for babies than Chinatown? Blanche was misled from the start. Goddamn Madame Johanna and her Prussian friends.
Number 1422 turns out to be next door to a Chinese laundry that sends coils of smoke in all directions. It’s a wary adolescent who answers the door, not the uniformed nurse who brings P’tit to the House of Mirrors for his visits. “Doctress has just stepped out,” she mutters.
Blanche is hit by the eye-watering reek of shit. “Who’s this doctress?”
“Doctress Hoffman, she just stepped out. Wish to leave a message? What name?”
Blanche has been steeling her nerves, half expecting bedlam—babies shrieking—but this silence is worse. “Where do you keep the infants?”
The nursemaid’s eyes flicker. “Doctress is—”
“Just stepped out, yes, but what I want to know is, where’s my son?”
“What name?”
“Beunon. I mean, Deneve.” Blanche pushes past the rigid girl and tries the first door on the right. It opens.
“Not—that’s for appointments,” says the girl. She yanks the knob and shuts the door again, but not before Blanche catches a glimpse of a narrow bed, a sink, and a rack of instruments and realizes what appointments must mean.
The girl has more grit than one would expect; she takes her stand between Blanche and the second door, her arms out. “They’re having their nap.”
Blanche’s pulse is hammering in her throat. “I pay eight dollars a week for his care and lodging, and I believe I have the right to see—”
While the nursemaid’s still blinking at her, Blanche shoves past her and opens the door.
So dark—that’s what strikes her first, even more than the hot distillation of the stink. Her eyes fight to make sense of the shapes. Crib after metal crib, littered with small limbs … “Christ, open the shutters.”
“That’ll only let more heat in,” the girl protests.
Blanche fumbles her way to the window, forces her skirt between two cribs.
“Which is yours?”
Instead of answering, Blanche grabs a handle and winches till light slants across the room. Weak goatish cries go up. Two small ones in one crib, three in the next … Tear-shaped glass bottles in mouths, or gone crusty on chests, or lost in corners with their black rubber teats dribbling onto the sheets. Every baby is tangled in the same size garment, once white. Eyes closed, or blinking wetly, or open and vacant. All, big and small, strangely inanimate; with a sensation like a blow to her chest, Blanche finally recognizes the tribe her son belongs to.
One black face, one or two infants who could be Indians, but most of them pallid. Pinching her nose to shut out the smell, her eyes sliding from crib to crib. She can’t see P’tit anywhere.
The foot of a facedown sleeper flickers and curls, and with a pounding relief Blanche spots the soft sole and seizes it, then scoops up her son. He seems so much bigger since she saw him last, and she presses kisses all over his howling face …
“I said, that one’s a girl.”
Blanche is scarlet. Deposits the stranger child back in her crib, wipes the foreign tears off her own mouth.
“Upset her, so you did, picking her up that way,” complains the nursemaid.
“Are you telling me they lie here all day in their own dirt with nobody picking them up?” roars Blanche, her eyes scanning the shadowy corners of the room.
“I do what I can.”
But Blanche’s not listening because she’s recognized P’tit at last, in the end crib. She approaches cautiously, in case he turns into another changeling. But no, that’s him, lying on his side, gigantic eyes sunken above patches of hot red skin. Watching her through the bars, as if she’s a wild beast. A bulging forehead, but Arthur’s pencil-thin eyebrows arching across it: How could Blanche not have known her baby?
He’s chewing on something mushroom-shaped. Blanche holds out her hands to him with an attempt at a smile, but he doesn’t stir.
She lifts P’tit carefully. His small garment is limp with sweat. He lets out a sob. Then a convulsive cough, and Blanche feels such pity that she presses him to her. Registers a surge of warmth against her bodice. Love, she thinks in shock, love flaring up between herself and this sobbing baby, love so hot she can feel it on her skin. Then the heat dies away and she realizes what it is: he’s pissed on her.
The girl’s moving from crib to crib slotting bottles back into mouths.
Blanche can’t bear this room a minute longer. She’s tempted to set down the wailing, sopping bundle that is P’tit exactly where she found him. But of course she won’t; she can’t; she could never do that, now she knows what it’s like here, and look herself in the face. So she pulls him onto her hip and makes for the passage.
“The shirt, if you please.” The girl’s too close to her.
“What are you talking about?” shouts Blanche over the baby’s cries.
“I need the nightshirt back.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Any parent that—‘own clothing to be provided on departure,’ see,” says the girl, with the rapid delivery of a memorized lesson, “because it’s the doctress’s property, she’s particular about it.”
For a moment Blanche is tempted to pull the sodden rag over P’tit’s head and throw it in the girl’s face. Instead, she steps away.
But the girl clings to P’tit’s hem. “The shirt or its value,” she pleads, “or the doctress’ll dock me.”
“Here’s its value.” Blanche spits on the floor.
The girl’s grip has shifted to P’tit’s tiny foot.
“Take your hands off my son.” Blanche yanks him away. P’tit is still weeping as his reddened mouth fastens onto the black thing in his fist, and he twists away from Blanche as best he can.
A mutter: “Reckon he knows my hands better than yours.”
The truth of that fills Blanche with a wild fury, and her fist is coming around to club the girl to the floor—but then she hears a sound. It’s a tiny one, and it catches Blanche’s attention only because it’s coming from the wrong room. Not from the room she just walked out of, where a couple of the babies are whining now, but from behind the door on the left. She listens hard; the sound’s gone. Perhaps she imagined it. “What’s in there?”
The nursemaid’s face tightens.
“You’ve got more?” Blanche asks, incredulous.
The girl says something that sounds to Blanche like “Yours is a weakly,” but that makes no sense. A weakling, is that what the girl means?
“He’s a what?” Blanche asks.
“You pay by the week, see? So yours is a weekly,” the nursemaid says, pointing at P’tit, whose sobs have calmed to little moans. “Through there …” She jerks her head toward the room on the left. “We call them the paid-ups because they’re all paid up. A lump sum, paid in full at the start. You get me?”
Black spots float past Blanche’s eyes and she thinks she might fall. She seizes the handle of the door on the left.
The girl’s hand locks over hers.
How many will she find stacked in each crib, alive in name only, sucking on, what—milk diluted down to cloudy water? Glazed-eyed and crone-faced, tiny bones showing through translucent skin? Nobody’s coming back for the paid-ups. It’s not that Blanche wants to open this door; she’s never wanted anything less. But she must. Somebody must.
Blanche is beginning to twist the knob, despite the girl’s resistance. She’s going in. That’s what she’ll always tell herself afterward—she’s on the very point of marching in there and hurling the shutters open, letting in the remorseless light, when P’tit bursts out coughing. The patches on his cheek, as rough as split wood, flare up as if burning. He whoops wetly, writhes and flails on Blanche’s hip, almost slips to the floor. Is that what her son wants most, to get away from her? Well, damn his ungrateful little hide. She lets go of the door handle and locks both arms around him.
The girl swerves across the hall and opens the front door for Blanche. “Keep the shirt,” she gabbles, gesturing as if to shoo the pair of them out. “I’ll tell Doctress Hoffman the laundry lost it.”
“This place—” says Blanche, as if her tongue’s made of iron. “Tell your doctress she could be had up on charges.”
Before she knows it, she’s on the step, and the door’s thudded shut behind her.
But are there in fact any charges? Blanche doesn’t know that a baby has what you’d call a right to anything. And what can she tell the police if she rushes off to report this doctress, and they ask how carefully Blanche inspected the house on Folsom Street before leaving her infant there for, what, more than eleven months? Oh no, you see, she’ll have to say, I left all the arrangements to my madam …
At least she’s out of that awful place; she and P’tit both are. Exhilaration pulses through her.
His coughing suddenly cuts off.
Blanche gives him a look to check if he’s breathing. His eyes are squeezed tight against the daylight. Now she can see that his skin is corpse-pale. A humid rash all around his mouth, where he sucks on that black object—which turns out to be an old doorknob. What a thing to chew on! P’tit lets out a hiccup, and for a moment he resembles nothing so much as a little old dipso.
Blanche almost laughs. She’ll rise above the fact that her white silk bodice is patchy with urine. She puts her son’s face close to hers. Plants a kiss on his forehead, just one soft little bisou, the kind she’s often seen mothers dropping on their babies’ heads.
He howls as if her touch is poisonous.
“All right, no bisous,” she snaps.
Then, on a hunch, she turns P’tit halfway around so he’s looking at the street, and he calms at once.
In the cab, the baby shies away from the air blowing in his face, so Blanche has to slide the window shut, which makes the cab stifling. Looking through the smeary glass, she describes the City for him, pointing at every oyster stall and cement wagon. P’tit blinks, expressionless; it occurs to her to wonder how far babies can see. He seems most interested in the doorknob he’s clutching. When Blanche tries to pry it out of his slippery fingers, he lashes out, cracking her on the eye.
“Bordel!” The pain is startling.
Her mother would have smacked him right back, to teach him. But Blanche’s hand falters. If the tiny fellow wants to hold on to the one plaything he’s used to, who is she to take it away?
There’s a Chinese funeral trailing by on Sacramento—drums and gongs pounding, firecrackers going off, dozens of white-robed keeners, enough fuss that it must be for a man, and probably an elderly one. Blanche gets out of the cab outside number 815 with P’tit in her arms, and on an impulse she steps forward to show him the cab horse, putting them face to face. Might her son grow up to have her talent for riding? “Regarde le beau cheval.” And then, correcting herself, because P’tit will have to be an American: “Nice horsey.”
The tired animal blows out through his nostrils and P’tit bursts into shrieks of fright.
Blanche clutches his lashing limbs. “Chut, chut,” she hushes him. “Home to Papa now.” Looking up at the second floor.
Where’s Arthur when Blanche needs him most?
For what feels like hours, she’s been carrying the whimpering baby through the empty apartment. Either with him facing out, her arm like a belt tying him to her, or with him facing in, but hoisted high enough on her ribs that he can lean over her shoulder. The important thing, it seems, is for P’tit not to be confronted with his mother’s face. Any attempt at a cuddle horrifies him.
Blanche feels insulted by this, but the undertow of guilt keeps her going, pacing through the airless rooms. How could she and Arthur have left their son in that hellhole on Folsom Street for a day, let alone most of a year? But we didn’t know. Why didn’t they know? Madame never told us. Nobody told us. But why didn’t they ask?
Jenny Bonnet’s the only one who thought to put the obvious questions. A virtual stranger; an interfering jailbird. If Jenny knocked on the door just then, Blanche would have trouble deciding whether to thank her or throw something at her.
Well. P’tit is here: that’s a fact. What Blanche is going to do with him tomorrow she doesn’t know, but right now she’s going to strip him down to his knotted diaper to cool him so he’ll stop sniveling for a moment and she’ll be able to think.
Even after he’s bare, his mottled skin boils with heat. Searching among all the scaly patches, Blanche can’t find anything like a fresh scab on either arm to suggest that Frau Hoffman bothered to have the babies vaccinated. She throws the awful nightshirt in the ashy stove so she can burn it tonight, once the evening’s cooled enough for her to be able to bear a little fire. The smell of P’tit clouds around her, as rank as the cat cages at the Cirque d’Hiver. And her bodice, her new white bodice, is yellow with piss. The two of them need a bath, above all things, but there’s no Gudrun to tote the water from the faucet in the downstairs hall. When Blanche hauled the baby up four flights of stairs to knock on the attic door a while ago, there was no answer. (Where could the girl be gone to all Sunday? Some endless Lutheran service?)
“Enough walking?” she murmurs to P’tit now. “Care to lie down?”
She puts him down warily, like he’s a bomb that might go off, on his back in the middle of her and Arthur’s bedspread. Then withdraws, so he won’t be appalled by her looming face. P’tit mouths his doorknob and coughs as if it’s choking him. Peers at the wall. With one claw he scratches a purple patch where his sparse hair meets his neck.
From this distance Blanche registers that her son is not shaped like any baby she’s ever seen. It’s not just his forehead, which swells like a turnip, something you might dig out of the dirt. His ankles are distinctly thicker than his bowed legs, his wrists thicker than his arms, and his breastbone pushes out, as sharp as the prow of a ship. She doesn’t remember him looking like this when he was born. And Blanche has never noticed any of these oddities on visits, but then, P’tit was always wrapped in white linen from head to toe, wasn’t he? Cap, bib, gown, little mittens and stockings … To mask the smell, Blanche thinks bitterly. To mask everything that wasn’t right.
She can’t look anymore; she turns her back to him. She must get out of this room and wash herself, put on a clean bodice at least. But P’tit’s not safe on the bed because babies roll off beds, don’t they? She doesn’t know much about infants other than a few ways they can die. Mind you, P’tit doesn’t seem able to roll. He doesn’t seem able to do anything. What’s wrong with him?
P’tit lets out a loud fart, which makes him cry. He blinks at the big windows, the excess of light, the yelps of the wheeling gulls.
Blanche casts around for something to put him in, because that’s what you do with a baby. Her apartment seems changed, inhospitable. It doesn’t have anything this terrible visitor needs.
The trunks she and Arthur brought from Paris! She hesitates, then starts to empty one of her own, because her lover will have a fit if she scatters his clothes. (And what’ll he say about her bringing P’tit back here without a word of warning?) She piles her skirts and chemises on the nearest rush chair. P’tit wails on, the blank lament of someone who doesn’t expect any remedy. Now she’s down to the yellowed paper lining of the trunk—but that’s too bare, the baby will bash his head on the hard staves. Blanche finds a blanket in a closet, then another, and does her best to pad the trunk with them before she puts a sheet down. It still looks too big, but that’s better than too small, surely? On Folsom Street he had only a fraction of this space—no, Blanche is not going to think about the so-called farm of Doctress Hoffman’s, because it makes her shake in a way she didn’t while she was standing there quarreling with the nursemaid. She’s going to bed P’tit down in this trunk if only he’ll stop that mewing.
There. Ready. She picks P’tit up, swiveling him to face away from her. His crying wanes. She carries him over to the trunk—but what if putting him down in it prompts another outburst? Maybe better to wait till his mood has turned. Besides, he’ll spread his terrible reek all over the sheet. It occurs to her that she shouldn’t have put him on her bedspread, for that same reason.
Only when her own stomach lets out a loud rumble does Blanche stop to think that P’tit might be hungry. Infants eat often, don’t they? She totes him over to look in the icebox. No milk, just scum in the jar. What the hell is she to feed the creature?
In the cupboard Blanche finds half a baguette. “Voilà! There you go.” But P’tit doesn’t seem to recognize it as food. She puts a chunk between his fingers. He puzzles over it for a long moment, then lets it drop to the floorboards.
She picks it up and presses it back into his small hand. Guides it to his lips—but he shrinks away.
Any normal child would gum the thing, surely? She looks into his mouth to check there’s no blockage. Pulls up his puckered upper lip, though it makes him pant with fright. A year old and not a single tooth. Unless P’tit’s worn them all away on his nasty doorknob? No, not even a stub. He’s like a one-year-old newborn. A baby who’ll never grow up—is that possible? A baby who’ll stay this way, a perpetual living reproach to her?
Panic, beating Blanche’s ribs like a drum. She needs a drink.
She ransacks the cupboard till she finds the wine they opened at lunch. Awkwardly, one-handed, she uncorks it with her teeth and pours herself a big glass.
Babies shouldn’t drink wine, should they? It occurs to her to offer P’tit some water instead. She fills a cup from the jug. P’tit lets her move the slick doorknob away a few inches and press the cup to his mouth, but he seems to have no idea what to do; the liquid runs down his neck and pools in the little hollow at the base of his throat.
Surely Blanche can lay him down for a minute, just to change her clothes? She tries it, spreading yesterday’s San Francisco Examiner across the middle of the sofa in the salon and putting him flat on it.
P’tit contracts as if in pain, face and feet drawing together, making the paper crinkle. It occurs to Blanche that he’s trying to sit. She scoops him into an upright position, although his tiny limbs are oddly resistant. Props him, with a cushion, against the back of the sofa. There’s something unconvincing about his pose, something out of plumb. He’s a mismade rag doll. Every so often he shakes his head as if saying a querulous no to some unvoiced question.
“We’ve got to go out,” Blanche tells him, speaking aloud to cut the silence. He needs diapers, clothes, a bottle, milk … but it’s impossible, because she can’t bear the thought of going back out into the scalding day lugging him with her. Not that such a tiny boy can weigh more than a cat, but he’s awkward to handle because she’s not used to it. She can’t go out, can’t have a bath, can’t do anything but sit here staring at the ugliest, saddest baby in the world.
Self-pity brims behind her eyes. Blanche fills up her glass again and has a few bites of stale baguette so she won’t get dizzy. Reaches down and cracks her silk bodice open, pulls it off. She can’t imagine ever wearing the nasty thing again.
After wrenching her sweaty chemise over her head in the bedroom, Blanche pours out a little water and scrubs herself to get that unclean feeling off. No sound from the salon.
P’tit needs a wash too, needs it worse than she does. She makes herself walk into the next room. He hasn’t stirred. He’s giving the wall an accusing stare.
Blanche picks him up and brings him back to the bedroom, sits him awkwardly on the edge of her bed. She wipes him down, flinching whenever she touches one of the rough patches in the crooks of his arms or in his leg creases. P’tit doesn’t flinch, or cry. She tugs the diaper’s knots open with some difficulty and lets the cloth slip off. It seems almost heavier than the baby, caked with brown. How often did that crew on Folsom bother to wash the babies? Blanche finds she must place P’tit right in the basin to soak the hard stuff off his tiny wrinkled bag and to wash in between his shrunken buttocks. Has she got it all? A smear on the bedspread: merde! She scrubs at it with another rag, widening the faint brown circle.
Now Blanche feels at least a little cooler, and P’tit must too, though he still seems as hot as a baked potato to her touch.
He stares in the vague direction of her bare body. Michetons pay well for such a view, she’d like to tell him, petulant. Her swan-white flesh is no comfort to this child, no home. He doesn’t know her from Eve.
“What shall we do now?” Blanche asks aloud.
No response except a shattering cough.
“Can you even hear me?” It strikes her that P’tit could be deaf and dumb, some kind of cretin for all she knows. Blank-eyed, barely alive. Why did she ever let her body make such a mistake? There are always ways—
Blanche shudders. That’s a notion that shouldn’t occur to a mother. Much too late to wish this small life undone. And yet she does wish it, every time her eyes approach him.
Not his fault. Her fault. For everything Blanche did before he was born, and everything she’s failed to do since.
Damn Jenny Bonnet and her questions. And me for listening to them.
She tries to concentrate on practical matters. She rather regrets having thrown the foul little shirt in the stove, because she hasn’t got anything else to put him in. It’ll be all ash-caked now. Could she bear to poke the thing out and scrub it in what’s left of the water? No, she’ll leave P’tit nude for the moment, because the air might do his scabby skin a little good. But of course, he’ll be pissing himself again soon if she doesn’t find something …
Blanche looks through the mound of clothes on her chair until she finds an old petticoat. She rips it into three pieces. Forms one of them into a diaper, a crude loincloth, really; it gives P’tit the air of some small saint in his final sufferings. The cloth keeps coming loose on the left. He scratches at his hairline as if something invisible is biting him.
If she could just run out to get the things she needs—but she can’t leave him here. Perhaps he does know how to roll, he’s just too scared to do it while this strange woman’s watching. Babies left alone wind up dead; Blanche has read about such cases. She’ll have to haul him with her and manage somehow … but no, she can’t carry a stark-naked infant around town. She’s washed them both, Blanche reminds herself pathetically. She’s done that much.
With nothing on but a chemise and a petticoat, she carries the baby from room to room to pass the time. She tries to keep her eyes off from the strangest parts of him: ankles, wrists, that sinister breastbone. At least he smells less disgusting now. “This is where Papa and I sleep,” she says. “There’s your caca on the bedspread that I’ll have to wash before your father’s very fine nose gets a whiff of it. And this room is where Ernest—your uncle Ernest,” she improvises, though the phrase doesn’t sound quite right, “he sleeps here when he’s not at Madeleine’s—that’s his lady friend—and this is where we make our coffee and heat up dishes from restaurants …”
The knock at the door makes Blanche spin around so fast she almost drops the baby. “Arthur!” She says it in relief but it comes out accusatory somehow.
P’tit bursts into tears. Coughs. Cries on.
“Chut,” she says urgently, rocking him too hard. “Shush now for Papa.” Crucial for him not to make a bad first impression.
It’s not Arthur at all, it’s some skinny gamin. Blanche wasn’t thinking straight; why would Arthur need to knock? She realizes she’s not even dressed, and she presses the baby to her chemise to cover herself up. The child gawks at her, handing over a note in familiar copperplate on pearly paper headed with the address of the House of Mirrors.
My dear,
I understand from Frau Hoffman that you’ve withdrawn your little one from her establishment. If I can be of service in helping you make new arrangements, do let me know. Otherwise I will expect you for your regular performance on Wednesday.
Blanche tears the note down the middle. New arrangements indeed. That treacherous salope can find herself another star dancer and see how her customers like it. “There’s my answer,” she says, handing the boy the scraps.
He’s whistling as he trots down the stairs—not merrily, more as if he needs the rhythm to keep his feet moving.
A sense of anticlimax settles over her as soon as he’s gone: a cloak of lead on Blanche’s shoulders. P’tit has pissed right through his diaper and her fresh petticoat.
Twenty minutes later Arthur finally turns up. Without Ernest, for once, thank God. And it’s all going to be fine, because he’s utterly charming. He kisses Blanche as if he hasn’t had the chance to do it in weeks and points his pencil-slim cane at the wizened new arrival like a magician flourishing his wand. “I didn’t know we were to be honored with a visit, monsieur. How you’ve grown! Viens ici, mon gars.” Arthur blows on him and makes comical noises.
P’tit keeps up his frozen stare.
“What’s this nasty thing?” Arthur tugs at the slick doorknob, but P’tit holds it tight.
Blanche cries out, “Don’t.”
He tilts those slim eyebrows that he gave his son.
It all spills out of her then, the whole sordid story of the Hoffman place, the weeklies, the paid-ups …
Arthur murmurs in outrage but interrupts before she’s even finished. “You didn’t know what it was like,” he soothes her.
You, he says, not we. And certainly not I. As if it weren’t Arthur who’d made the deal with Madame Johanna when Blanche was out of her mind with fever last September. Eight dollars a week: the price of three good blankets, say, or a best-quality corset. It sounds too little for proper care, now that Blanche is letting herself—making herself—think about it. No, probably not even eight dollars, it occurs to her; Madame, she knows, would skim off a percentage.
“Whatever made the Bonnet girl start asking about the baby in the first place?” mutters Arthur. P’tit, slumped in his lap, is gnawing on the doorknob.
Blanche hesitates. “It was—she happened to see his picture on my bedside table.” That’s not an answer. The irritation just below the surface of Arthur’s voice is exactly what she’s been feeling herself, but now she’s compelled to justify their new acquaintance. “They were just the sort of questions that anyone would have …” She trails off. Questions that Blanche and Arthur should have been asking all year instead of busying themselves with their own pleasures.
His tenderest smile. “You’re looking utterly exhausted, chérie.”
Blanche appreciates the sympathy, but it stings too. He and Ernest were eager enough to fuck her this morning; how can she be so transformed already?
“Gulli gulli!” Arthur tickles P’tit under the chin but gets no response. Takes both the tiny hands in one of his, lifts the limp arms. “Blanche. What’s this?”
His tone makes her hurry over and peer at the rash of red spots in both the tiny armpits. “Putain de merde!” she curses. It couldn’t be. Could it?
“Probably just a rash. Don’t you think?”
Blanche can’t speak, she’s so scared.
“A summer rash, where the sweat’s built up,” says Arthur more firmly, lowering P’tit’s hands. “If it was—”
“Face, hands, and feet,” interrupts Blanche. She’s read in the papers, that’s how it starts. She’s read other things too, such as the fact that it kills every third person who catches it.
“His face is fine,” says Arthur.
She examines P’tit close up: scaly red patches, especially under his chin where the drool collects, but there’s no rash, strictly speaking, either there or on his minute palms and soles.
“Well,” says Arthur, rising to his feet and handing P’tit back to her, “I should start looking for a new place for him. Something much more wholesome, farther out of the City …”
Arthur’s adjusting his waistcoat in front of the mirror, smoothing the curve of his fob and its dangling trinkets: the lucky crystal pig Blanche got him back in Paris, a coral hand holding a tiny dagger …
How to explain that the location isn’t what makes a hell? “You didn’t see it.”
“So we’ll choose the next place carefully, together. A real farm—”
“No.” Blanche almost shouts it. “We—I was an idiot,” she says carefully, “to think eight bucks a week could buy the kind of looking-after he needs.”
“So we’ll pay twelve.” Grandly: “Fifteen if we have to.”
“These places …” She swallows her sob as if it’s a hard crust. “The whole trade’s a swindle.” She tightens her grip on P’tit, and he starts to squirm. “We’re keeping our baby right here.”
A gentlemanly sigh. “We’ll get someone in, then.”
“Yes,” says Blanche, letting out her breath. Someone to help, that’s all she needs. It was on the tip of her tongue to suggest, out of long habit, that he ask Madame; she almost laughs. “The sooner the better.”
“Perhaps, for now, Gudrun?”
“Nowhere to be found,” laments Blanche.
“Oh, but I passed her on the stairs,” says Arthur, making for the door.
A couple of minutes later he’s back with the young seamstress.
Under her gleaming straw-colored braids, Gudrun’s wearing a wary look. “I know nothing,” she says, hands up like a shield. “I was youngest in my family.”
“So was I. We just need a little assistance,” says Blanche soothingly. She looks around for Arthur, but he’s disappeared into their bedroom. “Only until we find a nurse.”
The Swede shakes her head, eyes on P’tit as if he might explode. “What he got?”
“Is it disease?”
She clears her throat, outraged to hear her own fears stated so bluntly. “He’s perfectly well, thank you!”
Both women watch the baby, who slobbers on his doorknob and lets out a low wail.
“He’s hungry, that’s all,” Blanche insists. “Will you run down to the store for some milk and a bottle with a teat to put it in? Or hold him while I—”
“I run down,” says Gudrun, fast.
The girl clearly doesn’t want to touch him.
Clamping her teeth together, Blanche fetches some coins from her pocketbook.
Arthur emerges and pours himself some wine to sip while changing his dusty boots.
“Well, she’s not going to be much use,” Blanche tells him, listening to the ugly sound of Gudrun’s low heels clumping down the stairs.
“I’ll pop out this minute and start asking around.”
Blanche hunches her shoulders to ease them. “Mon amour—what if she’s right about the baby, though?”
He hoists his eyebrows as he adjusts the line of his striped pantaloons. “As she was the first to admit, she doesn’t know anything.”
Blanche glances down at P’tit in her lap. “His forehead—his chest—he bulges where he shouldn’t. Look at his wrists and ankles.” She whispers it, as if no one but the two responsible parties must hear. “He won’t meet my eye. He doesn’t even know how to smile—”
As if wounded by this list of his flaws, P’tit starts to cry, which makes him cough again. Blanche joggles him, clicking her tongue the way she would to calm a horse, which he doesn’t enjoy at all.
“Pauv’ bébé. Should I get the poor lad something while I’m out?” murmurs Arthur, fishing in the green chamber pot for banknotes.
“What kind of something?” asks Blanche.
A shrug as he straightens his cuff links. “A syrup or such. You know. For quieting.”
Fury behind the hard plate of her forehead. “He’s been quieted enough. I bet that doctress had them dosed to the gills.”
“Still, of course,” muses Arthur, “it’s what he’ll be used to. Seems cruel to cut him off all at once, especially if he’s not quite well, with that nasty rash under his arms.”
Blanche’s eyes narrow, because all at once she can see right through this man. Arthur doesn’t want his son here, making noise, making demands. He doesn’t want to be put to the least trouble in the world.
On the fifteenth of September, Blanche is groggy from panic and lack of sleep. Bolted into the tiny lavatory of the train from San Miguel Station, she drags her hair into an approximation of a high chignon. She arranges a few ringlets over her forehead, then re-pins the flat straw hat as far forward as it’ll go. She paints with speed and something near accuracy, bracing herself against the mirror as she applies a steady line of red to her upper lip. It’s melting already, so she scours it off with a handkerchief and starts again, ignoring the knocking at the lavatory door. She rubs at the little scab on her cheek where the glass grazed her last night—Jenny! Christ, those skewed limbs, the puddle of blood—and it starts to run red again. Blanche presses on layers of powder till the mark is fainter, at least.
She finally returns to her seat, leans back on the knot of her bustle, and tries to take a full breath.
Someone at the end of the carriage is warbling what Blanche recognizes as a Stephen Foster tune; there’s nowhere you can go to get out of earshot of his jingles. What an incongruously pretty day: the low peachy hills, the pale green sea in the distance. Sparse farms, and their owners heading with heavy carts toward the markets downtown because the train must be too expensive for them. Here comes the Industrial School on its arid plateau. A U.S. flag hanging limp above three long floors of cells. It’s not a school at all, but a reformatory. A scattering of boys outside, pecking desultorily at the dust with hoes. A few straighten up to watch the train rocket by, as if it’s their day’s sole entertainment. Whenever Jenny came this way, she filled her pockets with candy to toss over the fence for the inmates, Blanche remembers. What a child that woman was still, at twenty-seven.
“Weren’t that a female I saw over by the washing line?” a passenger remarks loudly behind Blanche as he gets up to use the spittoon.
“No, they send the girls to the Sisters now,” the wife informs him. “Ever since the supervisor got fired—for taking liberties, don’t you know.” The euphemism in a carrying whisper.
The Industrial School boys have been swallowed up in the dust already. Blanche stares out the other window, at a field of lettuce.
Chimneys growing in the distance. The train speeds up as they head down the long grade toward the passenger depot at Third and Townsend. The City’s coming at Blanche like a bullet to the head.
At the terminus, it suddenly strikes her that Arthur could be waiting on the platform, scanning the crowds for her familiar face. Blanche reckons the chances that Detective Bohen has arrested him already are slim to none. But where else can she go today? Should she pick a random town to hide in? If she doesn’t show up at tomorrow’s inquest here in the City, the detectives might put a warrant out for her.
When Blanche gets to her feet, everything goes black for a moment. Now that she thinks about it, she realizes she’s had only a sip of water today.
Her step slows as she moves down the platform toward the gate. Men are stacking a whole freight car full of ice, as neat as masonry, with chaff and sawdust for mortar. She scans the milling crowd for men with bird’s-wing mustaches. She dreads the sight of that lovely sallow face she’s woken up beside every morning since she was fifteen.
And yet … she’s almost disappointed that Arthur’s not here. It feels like a long time since they had their last battle, at the gaming saloon, just a week ago. Blanche shouldn’t have allowed herself the satisfaction of sparring with him that night, she sees that now. Should have fallen to her knees in the pose of some penitent Magdalene and begged him to tell her what he’d done with their son.
So many ways to dispose of a baby. Hand over mouth and nose. A cushion, a blanket. A cord; a ribbon, even. A quick shake or a blow. A fall. A drain, a culvert … Or don’t give him his bottle; that would do it, after a day or two, in this thirsty weather. Just go out, shut the door, and leave him to cry his way to silence. So many quick and simple means to finish off a small life that should probably never have started.
Blanche won’t let the tears come, not in front of this pair of patrolmen displaying their seven-pointed stars for authority as they peer suspiciously into every face for pustules. The smallpox has been spreading through San Francisco since May, so what good do they think it’ll do to examine arriving passengers now?
Outside on Third Street, the sun is dizzying. The push and clamor of the crowds overwhelm Blanche after three days of the silence of San Miguel Station. She finds a pump and bends to drink from it. Only a dribble; the pressure’s low. She thinks of that reservoir she and Jenny saw being gouged out of the hill, up at the back of Sweeney Ridge. It won’t be ready for a while yet. What’ll happen if the City runs dry?
Her throat floods with acid, and she swallows it down. Her arm aches already from keeping the delicate green parasol between her face and the hammering sun. There’s a Mexican slumped against a wall, wrapped in his serape. Funny to think his lot once owned this whole part of the world. A Prussian-looking busker pumping an accordion tiredly.
Blanche wishes she could afford a cab. She has to get hold of some cash today. Instead, she squeezes onto a horsecar going north.
“Terrible hot, ain’t it?” a fellow remarks. “Ninety-five in the shade, they’re saying.”
Blanche tugs down her short lace veil and pretends she hasn’t heard. A little conversation, a little flirtation … so many men think they can get a bit of her for free.
On Market, a Chinese man with a huge bundle of clean laundry tries to get on. But several passengers protest that the linens might be riddled with invisible germs, so the driver moves off without him. This is what plague has brought San Franciscans to, Blanche thinks: flinching from every smell, scrutinizing every face for danger, balking at sharing the same air.
At Morton Street, a couple of worn crib girls squeeze in. Blanche wonders if there’s any truth to the rumor that each one, in her narrow stall, services up to a hundred customers a night. With a small shudder, she looks away.
All along Kearny, folks are cringing away from the glare, crowding to the shady side of the street. Every dive and barrelhouse is spilling over. Temperance Lemon Cocktails, offers one awning, but the drinkers loitering under it look half soused to Blanche.
The coupled hacks slow as they haul the horsecar up the slope on its smooth tracks, and the passengers brace themselves. Of all the unworkable spots to build a city, thinks Blanche with exasperation. If you get tired in San Francisco, you can always lean on it, she remembers Jenny quipping.
Chinatown smells like a urinal, which Blanche notices only because she’s been out of town. The health inspectors have nailed disinfectant sheets over many more doors, and yellow flags hang like bunting for some canceled New Year. A Nordic-looking man plods up and down with a sign in the form of a gigantic arrow—FREE VACCINATION NO MONEY FREE TODAY—but he’s not getting many takers, because the Chinese bachelors with braided pigtails down to their hips are lined up outside the herbal shops instead.
Recognizing the square tower of St. Mary’s, Blanche jolts upright. She was heading home without thinking, but 815 Sacramento Street is the last building in the world she should approach today. Her brain’s all rusted up this morning.
As the horsecar creaks past Sacramento, she catches a glimpse of the blue-and-white mansion: the House of Mirrors. Yes, that’s where Blanche needs to go, she decides—for proof of her hunch that Madame Johanna told Arthur where the two women had fled to on Tuesday. How else can Blanche convince the detectives that it’s Arthur who shot Jenny—by mistake, because he was aiming at Blanche, but that’s still murder, no? “Driver,” she shouts, pushing her way down the car, her orange carpetbag snagging on hips and bustles.
She stands at the corner, her head aching and her mouth so dry that she’s not sure she’s capable of speech. A constant stream of Chinese bachelors parts around her, not an empty hand among them. Every man seems to be hauling a bale of shoes, a laundry bag, or a wet basket of sea life writhing on a bed of kelp; Blanche recognizes shrimp, squid, and those snails that always remind her of severed ears. Some of the men are toting their baskets on long sticks over their shoulders—in defiance of the City’s new bylaw criminalizing that tradition, or has nobody told them it’s a crime yet?
Gray’s Undertakers is just a block away, at Dupont. Perhaps Blanche should head straight there, to make sure the—what are they called?—dieners aren’t prettifying Jenny with their little pots of paint. But she finds she can’t bear to, not yet. Her stomach is a tangled knot. She hasn’t eaten anything at all since dinner yesterday evening. (Splendid stew, if I may say, Mrs. Mac, Jenny assured Ellen McNamara, though it wasn’t.)
So Blanche turns north, going past a runny-nosed Irish fiddler who can’t be more than ten. Chez Durand, just for half an hour, to gather her strength? It can’t be safe to go where the French go—where a Frenchman might guess he’d find a particular Frenchwoman—but then, Arthur’s hardly going to gun her down in a public place, is he? Even in his current crazed state, the man’s intelligent, and he can’t mean to end up on a gibbet in the yard of the Broadway Jail.
Under the striped awning, the brasserie’s crammed with drinkers. Safety in numbers, Blanche reassures herself, stepping inside. The print of the Champs-Elysées is back up by the door, minus its glass. That’s the only sign that Jenny was ever there.
“If we don’t keep our liquids up,” a female voice is remarking, “we’ll like to expire by lunchtime.”
Blanche hovers at the bar, trying to catch the eye of the owner. It occurs to her that Durand won’t know the news, because it can’t have hit the papers yet; Cartwright must be still working up his story for the Chronicle’s afternoon edition.
“Mademoiselle,” says Durand with a nod of acknowledgment, shoving a young man off a stool so Blanche can sit down. “Qu’est-ce que ce sera?” His mustache so thickly lank it hides his mouth.
Blanche shouldn’t have come here, not today. She can’t be the one to tell him. She orders a plate of vinegary choucroute—the first thing she can think of—and a beer.
At the piano in the corner, a ginger-haired man is thumping an accompaniment for a plump blonde with a Languedoc accent who giggles when she fails to hit the aria’s top notes. Blanche wants to slap her. She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.
When Durand comes over with her order, she looks at it queasily and takes a sip of her beer.
“If you see Jenny, tell her j’en ai marre. Enough!” he barks. “Since Wednesday I’ve been waiting. The season’s nearly over, I tell them, it’s halfway through September, time to eat leeks and apples, but they’re still craving their cuisses de grenouille …”
Blanche’s mind fixes on the frogs she released by the pond this morning. The small McNamaras licking their singed fingers by the bonfire.
“I’ll get my supply from someone else next spring, if I can’t count on—”
She makes herself break in. “Jenny’s dead. Last night,” she gasps, “down at San Miguel Station. We were—somebody shot her through the window.”
“Bordel de merde!”
Blanche slides off the stool, needing to get out of this place.
Durand shouts in the direction of the kitchen. “Portal!”
A muffled roar comes back.
“Get out here!” he roars. “He won’t believe it from me,” Durand tells Blanche, taking her elbow and pushing her down on the stool again.
The smell of her pickled cabbage turns her stomach.
The long-faced cook comes out, his apron spattered red and brown.
“Tell him,” the patron insists.
Blanche repeats her news, leaden.
Portal doesn’t curse or interrogate her about how it happened. Instead, he caves in like a man made of paper. He staggers, he writhes in his employer’s arms, tears flooding down his scarlet face.
Durand keeps kissing the side of his head.
Blanche’s cheeks burn. She pushes her way toward the door, almost reaching it before she remembers her carpetbag and has to turn back to grab it, her eyes low. Portal is still weeping on the bar. These foutu Frenchmen!
In Madame Johanna’s parlor at the House of Mirrors a quarter of an hour later, Blanche smooths her blue plaid flounces and tries not to count the minutes. Keeping Blanche waiting is just the widow’s little game, nothing worth losing one’s temper over.
Her stomach growls. She should have eaten that choucroute. There’s a fly buzzing intermittently against the window. Blanche arches a little, to ease the strain in her back. Funny how it never ached when she was performing on horseback twice a day or, more recently, doing leg shows in the Grand Salon upstairs.
What was the last one? Almost a month ago now; the Saturday night Jenny rode into her on Kearny Street. After Blanche went to Folsom Street and realized what kind of place Madame had consigned Blanche’s baby to—after she sent back Madame’s note, ripped up—she would have liked to maintain a stony silence and never lay eyes on Madame again, even if it meant forfeiting her pay for her last two performances. But three days ago, when Blanche had to flee town for fear of the macs and was desperate for cash, she swallowed her pride and came here for her hundred dollars—and the Prussian had the almighty gall to claim that the debt was the other way around. So Blanche wouldn’t be back here today for any reason less serious than this: she must find evidence that Arthur knew she was going to San Miguel Station. Only when he and Ernest are in jail will she be able to take a breath without terror.
How much longer is the woman going to make her wait?
You came within an inch of death last night, Blanche scolds herself. Surely she can manage to sit for a quarter of an hour in a quiet room where the thick drapes keep out the worst of the heat and where she knows that she’s not going to be shot at.
The door opens noiselessly. Blanche’s head jerks up.
Madame Johanna, in pearl-gray silk. “Ah, my dear.”
Blanche steels herself.
“You are not looking your best, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Do take some water.” Pouring two small glasses from the carafe. “I trust you’ve come with glad tidings about your little one?”
Blanche is rigid, eyes on the carpet. On Tuesday, why did she let herself complain to Madame about Arthur taking P’tit away? She’s not going to say a word about it today. She can’t trust herself not to burst into tears.
“Well,” sighs Madame. “If the baby’s lost for good, I do hope you feel the whole drama of snatching him away from Folsom Street was worth the candle.”
“I trusted you,” Blanche roars before she can stop herself.
“Indeed you did, to relieve you of a burden so that you could continue to work, more and more profitably, may I add, and live as freely as before.”
“I didn’t know what kind of rat hole you’d stashed—”
“Please don’t waste your time and mine by playing the innocent,” Madame cuts in.
Blanche clears her throat but still her voice comes out as a caw. “I only came here today because of my friend Jenny.”
Madame puts her head to one side. “Jenny. Do I know a Jenny?”
Blanche bets she does: Madame knows everybody, from gentlemen high up in the state government to the least shivering nine-year-old smuggled into the House of Mirrors. “Jenny Bonnet.”
“Ah, the girl with a taste for making a spook of herself in pants?”
Blanche forces herself to ignore that. “She got blown to pieces beside me last night. It was—it has to have been Arthur.”
The pale mouth forms a little O of shock.
As fake as some old diva at the opera, Blanche thinks. How could she have borne this woman for more than a year of her life?
“Did a bullet do this?” asks Madame Johanna, leaning over to explore Blanche’s cheek with one cool fingertip.
She pulls away and raps the accusation out. “What I find curious is that you’re the only person who knew I was going to San Miguel Station.”
“Did I know that?”
“Do you have the gall to deny it?”
“You may very well have mentioned it last time we met.” The Prussian turns the gold ring on her finger. “Goods, clients, petty bureaucrats … you can’t imagine how much business I have to attend to in a single day.”
“But who else—how else could Arthur have found out where I was?”
Madame half smiles. “I’ve had no dealings with your bel ami in some months.”
“What about his friend Ernest?”
“If I haven’t seen one Siamese twin, I could hardly have seen the other.”
Madame’s a liar par excellence, but why would she need to lie in this case? Why would she even bother? It strikes Blanche with an awful clarity that Arthur wouldn’t have gone to the House of Mirrors for news of Blanche, since—much to his fury—she’d broken with Madame more than three weeks before, the moment she reclaimed P’tit from Folsom Street.
She ransacks her memories of last Tuesday, when she set off for San Miguel Station in that buggy she hired from Marshall’s. Blanche could swear she didn’t tell anyone but Madame her destination. But of course—her stomach sinks—Jenny could have mentioned it to any number of people. Those unknown friends whose sofas she used to nap on. Jenny knew the strangest assortment of folks.
But Blanche presses on: “The detectives won’t believe Arthur’s involved, not unless I can show he knew where Jenny and I were last night.”
“Ah,” says Madame, letting the syllable out with a soft hiss. “Now I understand the purpose of this unexpected visit. You’re asking me to swear that your discarded mac burst in here yesterday waving a gun, mustache dripping with foam, and that I, out of pique because you’d disrupted my schedule of performances, sent him off hotfoot to shoot up San Miguel Station?”
Blanche chews her lip. Put that way, it sounds like a third-rate melodrama.
“It’s not that I have any objection in principle to misleading the authorities—especially these days,” adds Madame, “since the board of supervisors seems to have embarked on the doomed venture of trying to whitewash a city that’s been a byword for liberty. No, the problem is that my involving myself would draw the attention of the police to my business. And incidentally, the fable you propose would leave me open to an accusation of abetting—even inciting—a murder.” She winds up with a little nunnish smile.
Salope: the word is salty as blood in Blanche’s mouth, and it would be some relief to say it.
“As it happens,” says Madame, “the only man who’s been here inquiring after you is Signor Lamantia. He’s sent to me twice in recent weeks, offering considerable sums just to know where you might be.”
Blanche rolls her eyes. L’amant de Blanche; her Sicilian regular is just a buzzing fly.
“You really mustn’t hide away,” murmurs Madame. “The City’s memory is so short. Unless you’re planning to live on your rents, without dancing or michetons?”
It’s living through the next few days that worries Blanche. “Just pay me my hundred dollars and I won’t trouble you any further.”
“Ah, still you misunderstand. Let me show you the figures, to make the matter crystal clear.” Madame opens her ledger and slides it over. “Two show fees of fifty dollars each in the left-hand column. And on the right, your outstanding debits: costumes, musical accompaniment, refreshments, dressing, rehearsal and stage facilities furnished, advertisements circulated …”
“Hogwash,” Blanche cries. “You can’t work these madam’s cheats on me. You take your finder’s fee whenever you arrange a rendezvous, and it’s never been part of our bargain that I pay for costumes or music. I ain’t one of your stable. I’m an independent artiste, and the most popular ever seen at your house.”
“Nor has it ever been part of our bargain that you can quit on me with no notice, leaving me with no explanation to offer your many admirers,” says Madame coolly.
“What refreshments,” Blanche demands, “the odd glass of brandy?”
“Everything costs, my dear. Since you decided to forgo my protection so abruptly last month—”
Protection? A muscle in Blanche’s cheek twitches as she reckons the fortune this woman must have made off her hide.
“—well, I must recoup some of my losses by charging for what it’s cost me to turn you into Blanche la Danseuse.”
“To turn me into—” says Blanche, bewildered.
“You were a pregnant bareback rider,” says Madame, “with very little to make you stand out from the tide of female flesh that washes into this City. You were raw material, from which, I congratulate myself, I constructed a figure of considerable mystique.”
Blanche is speechless.
“Three hundred seventeen dollars, all told,” Madame adds more briskly, pointing to the figure on the right, “which, reduced by your earnings of one hundred, comes to two seventeen. Will you be paying in notes or coin?”
Blanche grabs the ledger and pokes the column on the left. “What about adding this: ‘Payment to Blanche Beunon in consideration of her not telling the police about the goddamn dying babies’?”
Madame looks as if Blanche has soiled her chair. And then her face changes—lights up. “Despite all the abuse you’re heaping on my head in your pardonable state of distress after the shock of your friend’s death, I would like to help you, for old times’ sake. May I suggest you let me announce one final Saturday appearance of the Lively Flea, tomorrow night?”
Blanche almost laughs. This woman is made of India rubber. “You must be joking.”
“For an unprecedented fee—say, five, no, ten times your usual. Five hundred dollars,” Madame almost sings, marveling at her own kindness. “Which would clear what you owe me and leave you with almost three hundred to be getting on with.”
Blanche swallows hard.
The Prussian’s fiddling with her wedding ring, not just waiting for an answer but enjoying seeing Blanche squirm. Letting them both hear the silence that implies consent. “Until tomorrow, then?”
Almost three hundred dollars. Blanche doesn’t open her mouth in case what comes out is You cold bitch, I’ll never work for you again. She has so little cash in hand, she can’t afford to give an unequivocal no. So she says nothing at all, just grabs her bag and makes for the door.
Almost cantering away from the House of Mirrors in her little mules, sweat breaking out on her forehead and under her arms. Forget the money for now. Blanche has to get off Sacramento Street before she walks right into Arthur or Ernest or one of their set. She ducks down the next passage, skirts a spill of cabbage leaves, and almost trips over an elderly man in the shadows. Only one sleeve on his shirt. An R burned on his dark gray cheek. He’s singing nasally:
His cap’s on the ground in front of him, but there’s nothing in it. His eyes are squeezed tight shut. Perhaps there were coins but some gamin snatched them already? There’s someone like this every five paces in the City, metropolis of bums of all shades. Blanche supposes San Francisco is where they wind up because of the mild winters; they figure at least they won’t freeze solid overnight. Jenny would have stopped and given him fifty cents for a bunk. Jenny would have learned the rest of his song, his story. I just like stories, she said, that first night at Durand’s. Blanche can’t afford to throw anything in his cap, she decides, and it’d only get stolen anyway.
“‘Do not detain me,’” he drones on sorrowfully,
For I am going
To where the fountains are ever flowing.
There’s the city to which I journey,
My redeemer, my redeemer is its light!
There’s the city. Oh; heaven is what he means, not San Francisco. Blanche speeds past the busker, away down the alley.