Belle Cora: A Novel (78 page)

“And do you think of the men who taught them to me?”

“Yes, and shut up,” he said, and pushed my face into the pillow, and I laughed, and then I groaned like a dying woman and grunted like a pig.

During all that time, not a single kind word ever passed between us. Both of us had to rid ourselves of burdens we had carried for years. I had to be rid of my desire to win, to triumph over Agnes and revenge myself on him. He had to be rid of the illusion that he was being with me in order to be dirty, to live a truth that fit his low opinion of himself. That’s what we did, time after time, over the course of several months. When all those impulses were burned away, we were left with the fact, at once comforting and uncomfortable, that we were in love. It crept up on us so slowly that there arose a secret bashfulness between us in the midst of our debauch—whether to express tenderness, whether the feeling would be returned—until one day, afterward, he held me gently and kissed me as one would a sleeping child. I lifted my hand to his cheek, looking at him. The tender touch given and returned brought the happy, lucky thrill that two love-smitten children might feel the first time they squeezed each other’s hands. Grateful, I wept, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he said, “No, don’t be, no, no, no, no,
I’m
sorry,
I’m
sorry,” stroking my head and kissing the tears away.

AFTER THAT, OUR PREDICAMENT WAS CONVENTIONAL
. His wife had a disordered mind, and was incapable of supporting herself, and he held a position that depended on the purity of his reputation. He told me that he was willing to relinquish them both. I did not believe him. I did not think he himself realized how much he liked the authority and influence
that he wielded as a pastor. To leave that would be bad enough; to leave a helpless wife would destroy him. He could not touch the earnings of a madam, and I was not prepared to give them up; I had grown accustomed to luxury and was unwilling to be poor.

Besides, I couldn’t bear the thought of telling Charley. He would be a man about it, but he would be hurt, and I was ashamed that I was not playing fair with him, after all his kindness to me. Outrageous as it may seem, I did not want to lose him. I loved Charley. I liked having him around me. It made me proud to have this formidable man at my side when I walked down the wooden streets of San Francisco, and it calmed my night fears to have him in my bed. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too.

So we went on this way.

Jeptha and I talked more freely, more truthfully, than we could while we were married. I told him many things about my time in New York, though never quite all (never about Jack Cutter); and we reminisced about Livy, and our voyage to California, and the hotel in Rio. Once, I told him, “I’ve lived pretty high, but I never tasted a food I liked as much as the plums we had aboard the
Juniper
.”

The next time we met, he brought a jar of plums, and we fed them to each other, face to face, just as we had so long ago. “They’re still good,” I said, tears running down my face.

“They’re still good,” he agreed, and our foreheads touched.

I reminded him of the time the Danforths gave us each a copy of the pamphlet
Marital Chastity
. I told him, for the first time, that I had been worried he would try to live by its principles, and he said that even the Danforths had eyes and must have known how doomed such a plan would be; he also told me that he knew I had given my copy of the pamphlet to the woman who had given me a Magdalene Society tract a few years ago. “And did you laugh?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t ready to laugh about any of it. You know, Agnes and I had been to see the Danforths before I went with you, and she had received her copy.”

We talked about Philippe, and how he had died—a grief for Jeptha bigger than the death of his sister Becky, because it had been Jeptha’s fault. “It broke me,” he said.

“Well,” I said, stroking his face, “I’m not saying it was good, I would never, never say that, but I think it’s the reason we can be together now, talking like this. It’s the reason you can understand me.”

“I think I have always understood you,” he said.

“Oh, you did.” I nodded quickly, putting my fist over my heart. “You did when we were children, and when we were happy in Livy you did, you were the only one who did. But then so much happened to me—I did so many desperate things—and I told myself it hadn’t changed me inside, but it had to, didn’t it? I had to die or be remade.” I sat up in the bed, and he watched me and waited while I gathered my thoughts. “You used to say, when you were a Baptist, that we all had to be born again. I used to think of that when we were on the
Juniper
, that I had been born again,
really
born again, and you had not.” I was choking and shivering; I could hardly get the words out. He started to speak; I put my hand on his lips. “I thought that was good then. I would hold you, and think that your innocence was my innocence, your goodness was my goodness. But it couldn’t happen that way.”

He sat up and wrapped his arms around me from behind; I pushed my head back against him, feeling content.

“We fit before,” he said. “And now we fit again.”

I told him what Herbert Owen had told me about the letter he had written to Agnes. When I first touched the subject I was careful, since she had been his wife a long time now, and she, too, had suffered, and in her way I guessed she had been remade, but I could not bear to leave the question unanswered. “How could you do it, knowing what she’d done? She
did it
, you knew she had, she helped ruin me in Livy, and all we’ve suffered since is due to it. Did you hate me that much?”

He paused, casting his mind back, I supposed. “I burned. All day long. Over you. Philippe. My religion was supposed to help.” He rubbed his neck with his hand and didn’t speak for a while. “I was too proud to accept the consolation I urged on everyone else. It seemed more honest to soothe myself with whiskey. I don’t remember writing to her, but it couldn’t have been just a mistake I made while drunk. I was flailing about; I needed to stop flailing; I needed someone to stop it.”

We lay there a moment, staring at the ceiling and contemplating all that, and then he continued: “Turns out it isn’t so easy to toss aside your
religion. After we struck gold, I started hearing a voice, inside my head but very persistent, calling me like Jonah, telling me to take that gold and build a church with it, and preach the Word. I drank to drown out the voice. I drowned it out with drink by night and with a hangover by day. Agnes came. I stopped drinking. I listened. The voice, which I knew was just another way of thinking, the voice wasn’t telling me the Bible was all true. It wasn’t telling me about the truth of any creed. It was telling me that there was a spirit in me and a spirit in the world, and I should honor it by making myself useful to people in the best way I know how, and to be as true as I could to the people who had educated me and sent me here, even if they might not think I was doing that by starting a Unitarian church in San Francisco.”

“But marry her, Jeptha?”

“I was drowning. She was my lifeboat. And I thought, At least one of us will be happy.”

“And she had traveled two thousand miles.”

“There was that, too.”

We managed to see each other once or twice a month, no more, sometimes out of town, sometimes, with various subterfuges, on the outskirts of town. I had a lot of freedom to move about, and I did not think that Charley suspected anything. And so we rolled along until the trivial incident between Charley and General William H. Richardson, which led to the formation of the Second San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. Soon we were fighting to save the life of the man I had betrayed.

LV

IT WAS A DAY IN NOVEMBER 1855
, either six or seven years into the Gold Rush, depending on when you date its beginning. I had turned twenty-seven, and in exactly one month it would be six years since I had stood on the deck of the
Juniper
and watched the mist clear to reveal a
bedraggled city of mud and tents and shacks spread out in a crescent on the bay. I woke up at around eleven, Charley woke up around noon, and we had our separate days. We had a plan to meet at seven that evening to go to a show.

At six-thirty, with the help of my lady’s maid, I dressed, choosing my garments with a consciousness of my duty toward a following of respectable ladies who took their ideas of fashion from the town’s best-dressed prostitutes and madams. They hated me. They wished their men would not visit my house. But we had a tacit understanding in this one matter, and I arrayed myself as much for them as for anyone else, in a walking dress of patterned blue organdy, a small scarf mantelet of embroidered lace, and a bonnet of fancy straw, blond lace, and crepe flowers. Describing it now, I realize how ridiculous a woman would look wearing it today.

Charley and I walked arm in arm a distance of several blocks to the American Theatre—
our
theatre, as we thought of it—then located on the intersection of Sansome and Halleck. We had attended hundreds of performances by scores of famous actors there. We were friends with the manager, and had been loyal to the place in its two previous incarnations—for, like so many San Francisco institutions, it had been destroyed more than once. Each time, we had mourned, and then rejoiced at the news that it would be rebuilt. It was now more beautiful than ever, as fine as anything in New York, with two thousand seats, thick carpets, red velvet curtains, gilt borders, bas-reliefs of scrolls and medallions and painted wooden infants tugging painted wooden drapes. House and stage lights were coal gas; earlier that year, with much fanfare, management had installed a complicated mechanism consisting of a block of lime, an oxy-hydrogen flame torch, and numerous mirrors, able to envelop a lone actor in a brilliant cone of light that
followed him across the stage
—I cannot exaggerate the astonished animal delight with which audiences in our upstart city greeted this effect that is so commonplace today, and which made pleasurable the performance of many a mediocre play and cast.

The play, called
Nicodemus; or The Unfortunate Fisherman
, was a performance by the Amazing Ravels, a French troupe beloved for their feats in gymnastics, ballet, and pantomime. There was a man on a tightrope, and a clown walking a chalk line across the floor in imitation of him, and it was well done, but at the midpoint of the performance a misunderstanding
occurred which diverted my attention from the rest of the show. Two fools way down below us, in the pit, were trying to catch my eye. One wagged his hat over his head. Smiling, I waved my hand, and Charley waved, too, to remind them that he was there and to keep their enthusiasm within bounds, but even after that, from time to time they looked back at us again.

Two rows forward of us in the gallery sat William H. Richardson, who had supported the presidential ambitions of Franklin Pierce at the Democratic National Convention and as reward had been made United States Marshal for the Northern District of California. To his left, in a dress not unlike one I had worn in ’52, was his new wife, Sarah, a recent arrival to our state; seated to her left was her friend Jane Matthews. Mrs. Richardson was small, bony, with a narrow bosom, a hatchet face, and protuberant eyes. If she’d been here in ’49 or ’50, the men of San Francisco would have slogged through acres of mud to gawk at her; but not anymore. Women were still outnumbered by men, but they weren’t scarce enough to be mistaken for angels. Her friend Jane noticed the men in the pit and touched Sarah’s elbow: Jane was so homely that both assumed the men were leering at Sarah. With apparently enough force to hurt, Mrs. Richardson rammed her elbow into her husband’s arm. He turned. She pointed to the pit. “See that?” Charley asked me. I nodded. Richardson, a little bulldog of a man, rose to his feet; mumbling something, he stepped over many pairs of legs and went up the aisle. A minute later, we were looking down at the top of his head; he was in the pit, talking to the fools, presumably telling them to stop annoying his wife. “Now they’ll all look up,” I told Charley, and they turned their faces up to us and toward Mrs. Richardson. They understood
—oh
—and, it was evident, they apologized for the misunderstanding and explained that I was Belle Cora, well-known madam of a fancy house on Pike Street, and they had been gawking at me, not at his lovely wife. Jane and Sarah were watching this pantomime and seemed to understand the kind of mistake that had been made. At any rate, Jane turned toward me, and so did Sarah Richardson, and then she turned away, flushing. She did not yet know who I was; she only knew that the gods, for their amusement, had given me the beauty that ought to have been hers. Her husband went back up the aisle, and a few minutes later he was in the gallery again, talking to Mrs. Richardson.
Then that silly tin-hearted woman, with her delicate self-regard, turned toward me, furious, and spoke my name—not addressing me, merely pinning the syllables on me—“Belle Cora.”