Belle Cora: A Novel (79 page)

She spoke heatedly to her husband. After a moment he turned and said to Charley, loud enough for the Ravels to hear, “The woman with you is Belle Cora. She runs a disorderly house.” I suppose that was meant as a preface to his remarks. He meant that he knew what we were, and our proper place was the soiled dovecote of the third tier.

Charley said, “Are you trying to save me from her?” People around us laughed, and Charley put his arm around me and said, “Don’t worry about me. I like this kind of danger.”

Richardson smiled back, while saying: “Get out. Both of you. Get out of the theater. I am General William H. Richardson. I’m the U.S. marshal.”

In our section of the gallery, most people were watching us and ignoring the show.

Charley stood up. “General William H. Richardson, you tried to help me, so let me help you. You’re letting your wife tell you what to do, and that would be fine if she was giving you good advice, but she ain’t. She’s making you look like a jackass. So I say, don’t listen to her. Sit down. Watch the Frenchmen.”

“William?” said Mrs. Richardson to her husband in a tone that reminded him of his duty.

“Don’t you talk about my wife,” said the marshal.

“Don’t talk about mine,” said Charley. We were not married, but Charley called me “Mrs. Cora,” and referred to me as his wife, and that was why I was known as Belle Cora. Richardson sat down. His wife hissed in his ear; he hissed back. After a while, he left his seat again, was gone for ten minutes, came back, and spoke to his wife. He may have had a drink in the meantime, because he didn’t bother to keep his voice down, and he turned his head to glower at us as often as he looked at her. “He won’t. They come here all the time. He’d rather lose us than them.”

He had spoken to the manager. We had known the manager of the American Theatre since it was built. We remembered the first American Theatre, built on landfill then so infirm that the whole house had sunk several feet from the weight of the opening-night audience—we were
there—and after that, at high tide, the patrons had to walk over a plank bridge
inside the theater
to get to the show. We had seen the city burn six times.
We were forty-niners
. Mrs. Richardson was the Johnny-come-lately.

“I knew it.
I
should have talked to him,” she said. Down on the stage, the Ravels were doing a selection from a famous ballet, but I gave all my attention to Mrs. Richardson. Suddenly she said, “My
mother
,” and then she stopped herself and wept silently, now and then sniffing and wiping her eyes on the backs of her white gloves. He touched her elbow. She jerked it away from him. A minute later, she said in an out-of-doors voice, “I could have married Francis Randolph Hayes. I could be Mrs. Francis Randolph Hayes.” She stood up, and here is where, I have to say, she made a spectacle of herself, looking out at the audience as if accusing them all. “American Theatre, indeed. Nothing but a great big cathouse, that’s what it is, really. Cathouse!”

From above and below, from left and right, people peered at her through opera glasses, elbowed their neighbors, pointed, and grinned. She was causing herself serious, lasting damage. She tugged at her friend Jane’s arm, saying, “I won’t stay a minute longer in this
cathouse
,” and Jane got up, and Richardson got up and followed them out. As they left, I heard her mutter, “U.S. marshal. U.S. marshal indeed.”

WHEN THE SHOW WAS OVER
, we walked to the El Dorado, which had been rebuilt for the third time, grander than ever. We went up to the balcony, from which we could eat and drink while watching the smalltime gamblers milling around the bar, the roulette wheels and the faro tables and the monte tables. Up here, there were well-appointed rooms with carpets and potted plants and spittoons and windows, but usually the shades were down and a few oil lamps sufficed for illumination. To be in these rooms, wagering fantastic sums, winning without vainglory, losing without complaint, was a matter of pride to the big men of San Francisco.

We ordered steak, oysters, caviar, and champagne. Big Pete spotted us and came and sat at our table. We told him what had happened at the American Theatre. He said that he had met Richardson: about time somebody put him in his place. Big Pete looked over the rail and said, “Speaking of shit, look what’s coming through the door.” Charley and I
looked down in time to glimpse the face of the man who had just entered the El Dorado. “I know him,” said Big Pete. “Owns a bear.”

“Abner Mosely,” said Charley. We had both seen him before, at a match in which Mosely’s fighting bear, Kicks, had competed against a bull. He had been here since ’47. He was a veteran of the Mexican War. He had had many little doomed business ventures, but his luck seemed to be changing. The bear had won.

As he walked nearer the faro table, which was just below us, his hat gradually eclipsed his face. He walked out of view entirely. Then he reappeared on the second floor and approached our table. He was a man whose looks gave a perfectly accurate account of him. His short nose proudly displayed its hairy nostrils. In his wet mouth, whenever it was open, one saw acres of gum and Niagaras of saliva. He had freckly skin and a bushy red beard.

“Just the folks I came to see,” he said, apportioning a hideous leer evenly among Big Pete, Charley, and me. “Gonna clean you out. Ready for that?”

“All right,” said Big Pete, running an oversized finger across the irregular brim of his absurd hat. “Only, suppose we win. What do we get? I’ve got no use for a bear. What about you, Charley?”

Mosely said he’d have us know he had the money, thanks to Kicks, who had surprised a lot of folks who didn’t know as much about bears as they thought they did. He was here to play, and this was going to be his night.

“All right,” said Charley, and Pete said, “We’ll take your money.”

And Abner Mosely, because he was insulted, because he thought it might rattle Charley, and finally because he just liked to be disgusting, said that with the money he won from this game he planned to spend a night of rapture with me.

Immediately, yet it was not unexpected, I felt Charley’s hand release me. The legs of his heavy chair made a sort of musical groan as Charley shoved it a few inches back across the hardwood floor. He rose to his feet, and walked briskly to Mosely, who flinched when Charley put an arm around his shoulder. Mosely was probably armed. So was Big Pete, who put his hands in his trouser pockets and watched alertly, and so was Charley, who said gently, as if talking to an errant nephew: “Mr. Mosely,
you need to realize that you are in the El Dorado now, not some low gambling hell. We don’t talk that way here. Besides, you didn’t realize you are speaking of Mrs. Cora. Now that you do realize, I guess maybe you want to say you’re sorry.”

“I won’t dance to your tune so easy,” said Mosely, pulling away and showing us his slimy mouth.

“Of course you won’t, Mr. Mosely,” said Charley. “You’re a proud man, who knows about bears. But if you don’t say you’re sorry, Mr. Hughes here will ask you to leave the El Dorado and not come back. And you won’t win my money in a poker game. That’s what you really want, ain’t it? Unless, maybe, maybe, you’ve decided that this place is too rich for your blood, and you are looking for an excuse to leave.”

Mosely appeared to think about that. Perhaps there was some truth in it. Certainly he had been over his head from the moment he had come through the door. He bowed to me with mocking ceremony. “Madam, my humble apologies.” Looking from Big Pete to Charley, he said, for the second time, “Gonna clean you out.” But I could see he was scared, as he had every right to be, and he went into the game hoping that things were not as they appeared to be and would turn out better than they usually did.

I remained at the El Dorado, for the pleasure of seeing Mosely when they were done with him. A waiter brought me coffee and some sweet biscuits. Someone had left an old edition of a fat British paper that serialized novels: in this issue, part of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and I occupied myself with it. I had not read the earlier episodes, and there was no synopsis, so I had to guess at the parts of the plot I had missed. What made this count so determined? Why was this other man scared of him?

Another, much slimmer journal peeked out from behind a napkin: it was the
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin
, edited by my old acquaintance James King of William. King’s bank had failed, ruining hundreds of people, including him, and badly tarnishing his reputation. He had turned all the opprobrium onto his former associates, by writing letters to San Francisco newspapers, which helped to save his name and had the incidental effect of bringing his talent for vituperation to the attention of the public. Only last month, with the backing of some Know-Nothing merchants, he had started the
Bulletin
, full of gossip, scandal, and highly
personal attacks on local politicians. It sold briskly. Charley and I both read it. It often mentioned friends of ours.

The band played downstairs; waiters came and went. Laughter and curses emerged from behind the door to the little room where Big Pete and Charley and a few others were playing with Mosely. When I say they were playing with him, I mean like a toy. At last the door opened. Mosely staggered out, followed by the men who had his money, and who also had, I learned later, a makeshift but legal bill of sale for his fighting bear. He looked at me blindly. I said, “I’m ready, Mr. Mosely. Do you have the money?” Laughter.

Big Pete spoke to a waiter, who went downstairs first, and I watched from the balcony as Mosely made his way under the chandeliers and past the roulette wheel and the faro table. The waiter, having spoken to the bartender, handed Mosely a big bottle of whiskey, telling him it was on the house; Mosely took it without a word and stumbled into Portsmouth Square. Later, he claimed that he had been cheated. I don’t doubt it. As events were soon to show, he was on a winning streak.

THE NEXT DAY, I LEFT CHARLEY
at noon to stop at the post office, where I picked up a letter from Anne, and I read it on the carriage ride home. Frank, whom she referred to, in every letter, as “the precious gift you brought us from New York,” would be eight years old in three months. He had shown himself so bright that he was already attending the winter school and using the fourth-grade reader, and the teacher, a young widow, doted on him, as proved by the fact that she had intervened to stop a fight between Frank and another boy, who was only half a year older than Frank but much bigger and stronger because of Frank’s illness, which had worried us so much last year. The doctor—Livy had one now—had said that Frank was not consumptive, and would catch up in growth. Though delicate, Frank was brave, as one could tell by the things he dared to say to larger children.

I put the letter in my lap, and, as usual with Anne’s letters, I tried to guess what she had left unsaid. It had to do with his character, I supposed. Five traits emerged consistently. He was “quick,” frail, stubborn, acquisitive, and tactless (he had often hurt the feelings of Anne’s daughter, Susannah, who doted on him). I did not know whether to count it a sixth trait, or simply the logical outcome of the others, that he was evidently
friendless: if he had friends, Anne would certainly have mentioned them. Anne always put everything in the best possible light. I wondered if he was a sissy, or a loner, or just unlikable.

AROUND NINE-THIRTY THAT EVENING
, my establishment was open. The wine flowed. The girls exhibited various degrees of lacy dishabille. The fleet, sensitive fingers of Mr. Rice, a talented freedman from New Orleans, were coaxing an iridescent Chopin waltz from the piano. Charley was out. By midnight he was still out, but that was hardly unusual or any cause for worry.

Lewis came by. He was a man of consequence now. David Broderick (who over a year ago had returned to power, as he had predicted he would) had made Lewis a clerk in the Board of Supervisors. He went to an office in City Hall almost daily; what he did there, I cannot say. He and Jocelyn had become a couple, secretly, and broken up, and reunited; recently, she had said, with a shrug, that she would let him make an honest woman of her—in a few years, if at that time he still had the notion. I urged her not to show him more public affection than she did to half a dozen others, and she tried to comply, but it must have been suspected, because Lewis had, with his fists, knocked out a tooth and, with his boots, broken two ribs belonging to a man who had suggested that Lewis lived off Jocelyn’s earnings.

Edward and Lewis had patched up their differences, and we all got along better now, because we had gotten more used to the kind of life we lived in this city, and because, you might say, we had all reduced our expectations of one another and did not worry as much about each other’s character flaws or whether our wicked ways would lead to a bad end.

I was sitting on a sofa with my back to the piano, and facing the double doors that led to the hallway. “Guess who me and Charley met today?” said Lewis, walking toward me. “General William H. Richardson.”

That was odd. We’d never met Richardson until the night before. A moment later, Edward came in; he watched us in a way that made me uneasy. I could tell he knew whatever story it was that Lewis was about to relate, and that he expected it to worry me.

“Where?” I asked them. “When?”

Mr. Rice finished his waltz and began playing “Long, Long Ago.” “Not here,” said Michelle, slapping a gentleman’s hand lightly. “We don’t do
that sort of thing here. You know that.” By “here,” she meant “in this room.”

“A couple of hours ago,” said Lewis, and with much enthusiasm he told me the following story.

Richardson, who had apparently been asking for Charley in cafés, barbershops, and saloons all over town, finally caught up with him in the Cosmopolitan, saying, “That’s the man who insulted me.” He was very drunk, and he had three friends with him. Some of Charley’s friends were already present, and, as usually happens in such cases, the two groups both worked to cool tempers (mostly Richardson’s temper) and brought about a truce. Richardson and Charley shook hands and stood each other rounds of drinks.