Belle Cora: A Novel (73 page)

I ARRANGED THROUGH A RESPECTABLE INTERMEDIARY
to rent a seat on a pew at the Clay Street Unitarian Church. It was a new wood-frame building smelling of paint and sawdust, between a bank and a saddle-and-harness
store. From the outside, it looked more like a Masonic temple than a church. Inside, one crossed a lobby into a cavernous room where services were held. Heavenly rays complete with swirling dust motes shone down at steep angles through tall, narrow windows along high walls left and right, on men prosperous enough to have brought their wives to California. Nearly a quarter of the congregation was female.

And here I was, hardly understanding why, trying to look brassy and be a hussy, but terrified to be in this big hollow room because of the man here, this tyrant over my emotions. I felt at that moment that everything I had done this last year I had done only for the purpose of pushing him out of my thoughts; and now he had ruined it; he had started a war against me, by returning to my city and marrying my enemy. I could not let him alone, because he wasn’t letting me alone.

As I walked with a folded parasol down the center aisle, most of the men and women who turned to look at me did so because I was lovely and dressed like a delicious confection. A few of the men gave me knowing or surprised looks; one wagged his finger at me—waist-high, to keep it a secret between us. My pew was the third from the front, as close as I had been able to get. Jeptha was only a few yards away, standing at the pulpit, looking strong and healthy. She had accomplished that. She had taken him in hand. He gave me a nod of welcome appropriate to a pastor seeing a new face in his large, well-attended church; but I was confident I was making him uncomfortable. He was trapped. This was what I had come for—to remind him that he was a hypocrite with a sin on his conscience, like that preacher in
The Scarlet Letter
. Agnes played the harmonium, sitting at a bench behind the instrument, a little to the rear of the choir but visible to the congregation, which she faced at a slight angle. So she, too, was trapped. She certainly would not want it known that I had been married to Jeptha once, and my presence was perhaps a torment to her, but she was more resourceful in these things than he was—she returned my look and filled her eyes with pity for my degraded condition.

When I left, it seemed to me that I had gotten the worst of it. The following week I didn’t come, but I couldn’t think straight, wondering what was going on and whether Jeptha and Agnes were discussing my absence, my defeat. So, on the third Sunday, I was back, and then I went Sunday after Sunday, though it tortured me to watch him, knowing he belonged
to someone else. I wondered what their fun was, and what they talked about, and what they did together in bed.

Eventually, I learned from one of my Unitarian customers that I had created a controversy. Several female members of the congregation had signed a petition demanding that I be banned from the church, because respectable women should not have to be in my presence. Several others had replied with a petition that I be allowed to attend, because Mary Magdalene had been such a good friend to Jesus, and because the hope of my redemption was more important than the disagreeable feelings I aroused; and though there were fewer names on the second petition, it was the one that prevailed. It bore the most important signature, the signature of the pastor’s pretty wife.

The congregation’s developing attitude toward me was reflected in the changing composition of my pew. One awful Sunday, I was alone on my bench, while the godly were jam-packed hip to hip in all the others. The next Sunday, some bachelors joined me on my lonely bench; and the next Sunday, well-meaning wives, one of whom handed me a tract from the Magdalene Society. The week after that, thanking her, I made her a gift of
Marital Chastity
, the very copy presented to me a lifetime ago by Mrs. Danforth just before my marriage.

From behind the harmonium, Agnes smiled at me. I smiled back. We hurt each other. Were his dreams troubled by the memory of my flesh? She had to wonder.

Charley generally woke up long after services were over on Sundays. I was ready with explanations for my behavior, some of which I believed, should he ever ask.

LI

THAT SPRING, THE CITY WAS FULL
of worried men. My business was good, but business in general was bad. Out there in the mining camps and the towns, people weren’t buying much. Fewer were coming to California
in the first place. Warehouses were glutted. My gentlemen talked about conditions while spending liberally to distract themselves. Tom had gone bankrupt. Harry had gone back to the States. Dick had gotten bad news from home and shot himself.

Even successful men had to worry, for California riches were so often temporary. They seemed
by nature
temporary. One heard constantly of newspaper peddlers and street sweepers in San Francisco who, a year ago, had been “worth a hundred thousand,” and lost it by trying to corner the market in rice, or by being sued for the actions of a dishonest partner whose present whereabouts were unknown.

With their nerves in this excited state, men began to look around, not so much for a group to blame as for a magical solution to the problem, a human sacrifice with which to bribe the gods. There was an ominous spirit in the air. This new creature we had not yet learned to call the Gold Rush was undergoing a metamorphosis possibly natural to its kind. We felt a little of what the French must have felt during the various unfolding phases of their revolution. What came next? No human being knew, but the thing knew,
it
knew.

I recall the spring of 1851 with the split vision familiar to people who have participated in famous events. Every few years there is an article or a book, and even if I quarrel with its contents, some little part of it is a revelation: so
that’s
what was going on! I have, today, a mountaintop view of matters that were then too near to be understood.

I remember the flavor of the jam on my biscuit and the name of the newspaper in my hand when I learned that English Jim (still claiming, first of all, that he was innocent of the robbery, and, secondly, that he was not English Jim) had been convicted in a regular court and sentenced to hang. And I remember hearing bells and smelling smoke, and going out to see what was happening, and almost losing control of my frightened horse, and paying laborers, all Australians, to empty the house in case the fire’s rapid march brought it as far as Dupont and Washington (it did not). It was Angelique who told me solemnly over breakfast that the fire had been started by friends of English Jim, to punish the city for convicting him. So she had heard: it was a popular theory at the time.

Angelique was a big, splendid girl with stubbornly medieval notions of the world. She knew that red-haired men could not be trusted, and that her sister in North Carolina was a coward from birth because her
mother had been frightened by a horse during the pregnancy. Half of what she earned each night at my house she lost at the El Dorado’s roulette wheel, because she knew that lucky numbers were predicted in her dreams, as interpreted by
Old Aunt Dinah’s Policy Dream Book
. She knew, having been told it was so by the newspapers that Pauline read aloud to her, that all the crimes in San Francisco were the doing of one well-organized gang directed by English Jim, who was still calling the shots from his prison cell. And either Senator Broderick was in the pay of English Jim, or English Jim was paid by Broderick, she wasn’t sure.

One day I overheard Pauline read to Angelique an article from the
Alta California
, San Francisco’s leading newspaper, which had been founded by Sam Brannan and expressed his views. The best men of the town, the paper reported, had banded together to form a Committee of Vigilance. Out of fear of reprisals from the vigilantes’ targets, the membership of the committee could not be revealed. It was organized as a secret society, with secret passwords, and weapons. But any honest citizen could join, and the committee was not to be feared, because only dangerous and lawless people would be hurt by it—only criminals, and incendiaries, and the corrupt politicians who helped them. No name was mentioned, but everyone knew whom they meant.

So it was true. There was to be a little war between Brannan and Broderick, and I must see to it that both sides would feel themselves beholden to me. Sam Brannan, during his last debauch at my house, had warned me that even whores and madams were going to get off the fence, and if he saw Judge Edward McGowan or any of Broderick’s other cronies in my house, he’d see me shut down. Later, McGowan himself had asked me where I stood and what it would take to get me to be a partisan of David Broderick.

This McGowan, a great patron of parlor houses, was particularly fond of a small, big-eyed, redheaded girl I had that year. I wrote to him now, and he agreed to meet me. Late that night, we sat at a table in the back room of a Commercial Street restaurant—me, Charley, Big Pete, and Judge McGowan—and I told him that I wanted to meet Broderick. I could be useful to him, but it had to be secret; secrecy was the key to my usefulness.

Judge Edward McGowan, “Ned” to his friends, was to be sought for
“questioning” by the Vigilance Committee five years later, and his image is preserved in letter sheets created at that time by printers sympathetic to the committee. He was corpulent, with the sloping shoulders of royalty on playing cards. His typical dress included a high collar, a linen shirtfront, a bow tie, a fancy waistcoat, and a fine gray herringbone-tweed frock coat and trousers, usually rumpled and worn at the cuffs and elbows. He kept his fair hair greased into a lank mass covering his ears and topped it with a pale-brown silk hat. Presiding over his appearance, making sense of it all, was a mustache like the cowcatcher on a locomotive, its tips extending past the outline of his face, its lower edge shrouding his lips. It made his expression hard to read.

He had the habit, which Irish politicians share with their priests, of asserting his faction’s official opinion as a dogma, with an air of having secret reasons he was not at liberty to discuss: Tim is a hero; Jasper is a scoundrel; the proposal of the other party is a scheme to enslave white men. It was his duty wherever he went to promote a given version of events, as it is a sandwich-board man’s duty to patrol a given sidewalk, bearing witness to the Excelsior Paint Company. At times a fugitive smile or a quick remark would admit to otherwise unacknowledged subtleties. It was when you were his ally, and he was advising you about tactics or explaining the enemy’s strategy, that he came closest to acknowledging the elusive intricacy of the universe.

We were discussing places where Broderick and I could meet when a young man came into the restaurant and talked for a moment privately with McGowan. When the judge returned he said, “I will not be able to convey your message to David Broderick tonight. Tonight Mr. Broderick must save a life.” He sat and ordered dessert from within the invisible cloud of expectation he had created, and only then did he explain: “Mr. Brannan, Mr. William Tell Coleman, and their newly anointed Committee of Vigilance have begun their attempt to subvert the elected authority of this city. This evening a man named Jenkins was caught stealing a safe. Some boatmen caught him, and instead of giving him to the police, they gave him to the committee, which wants to show its strength by hanging him. Mr. Broderick will talk reason to the mob.”

Not long after that, we heard fire bells. They stopped and started again. McGowan said, “It’s a signal; they’re taking Jenkins to the plaza.”

“Let’s go see,” said Charley quite casually: it would be interesting, that was the idea. We all walked to Portsmouth Square, and stood on the plank sidewalk outside the Union Hotel. “There they are,” said McGowan after a while. Just atop the façade of the Jenny Lind Theatre was a full moon, which had survived a bout of smallpox as a child, and its light, assisted by torches in men’s hands and by lamps in the windows of gambling houses, gleamed episodically on the faces, hats, hands, and tools of the crowd pushing up the square. I could not grasp what was happening all at once; I saw this detail and that, and my mind created the picture gradually in a series of small puzzles solved. The captive—Jenkins—staggered and stumbled a little in advance of the vigilantes, a cigar in his mouth, his feet in shackles, hands tied behind his back, urged forward with an occasional shove from a couple of men behind him. Just to the rear of the two men doing the pushing walked Sam Brannan, recognizable by his rangy body and his ear-to-chin sideburns. As the crowd surged up the street, people in the hieratic costumes of the West spilled out of the hotels and the saloons and gambling houses: bartenders with white aprons, men in flannel shirts and neckerchiefs, men in white shirts and vests, men in trousers and suspenders, prostitutes in balloon-sleeve dresses and long white gloves.