Belle Cora: A Novel (89 page)

After dark, whenever there were noises in the house, my heart beat faster, for I hoped that it was Lewis sneaking in; he would be wet and bedraggled, I would scold him for the risks he had taken, and he would answer all my questions. But he did not come, that night or any other night. With each newspaper Jeptha brought home, my pulse would race until I had scanned its columns and made certain that it did not contain news of Lewis’s capture or death. At last Jeptha began to arrive home having performed this chore himself; I would hear him on the stairs and anxiously interpret his face during the second before he said, “Nothing about Lewis.”

The
Bulletin
reported that Andrew Gray, a wheelwright, had apparently hanged himself from a rafter in an empty warehouse. He was married with two young children.

Another letter sheet came to the post office. This one showed the vigilante 756 infantry and field pieces pointed at the entrance of the Plaza Market, headquarters of opposition to the committee, and was entitled: “Complete Triumph of the People! Exciting Events of Saturday, June 21st, 1856.” On the writing side of the letter sheet, in Lewis’s handwriting:

Agnes lent me a book from her library,
Geography of the Spirit World
by James Victor Andersen, and I read it, the better to understand Agnes and because I had time on my hands. I found much to admire in Mr. Andersen’s vision of the universe, and especially in his account of an afterlife in which the deceased, like wounded soldiers brought to a hospital behind the lines of a terrible ongoing war, were gradually healed—a process that might take more time than they spent in the flesh. No one was damned. They all came with various burdens, and slowly, tenderly, they were helped. When they were ready, they moved on to other, unknown, higher spheres. Oh, it ought to be like that! If only it were true!

I assisted Agnes and Phoebe with household chores. Sometimes I cooked meals in the kitchen, and Agnes and Phoebe kept me company there, busy sewing or knitting. On a day like that, when Jeptha was out of the house, Agnes remarked casually that she thought Jeptha, at least until recently, had been unfaithful to her. “He used to go out of town every two weeks. He was secretive about it. I think he was seeing a woman.”

Phoebe, knitting, nodded. “There’s no doubt of it.”

I would say they spoke as if of a stranger’s infidelity, but there was actually even less disapproval than that. I watched the tips of Agnes’s needles repeatedly sliding and separating like the heads of two whispering gossips while I considered and discarded several replies and at last, after too long a delay, settled on, “Oh dear, Agnes.”

“I’ve upset Arabella,” said Agnes to Phoebe. “Cousin, we mustn’t blame Jeptha too much. Nature has given him strong masculine urges, which I am no longer able to satisfy. I become pregnant easily, whatever precautions I take, and then, every time, I lose the baby, and it is like a great hammer, it crushes me to bits, and I am months putting myself together again; and always after this reassembly we see a piece or two lying about and we don’t know where it goes. I can’t let it happen again. I can’t, and … I am human, but my urges have never been particularly strong.”

She raised the knitting up to examine it. “I no longer believe in the institution of marriage.” She began again: slide and separate, shifting the little loops of yarn. “I don’t believe that men and women should be in bondage to one another. Swearing eternal fidelity is romantic, but
impractical, for everything is change, as the philosophers tell us, and you can’t dip your hand into the same river twice. We must permit those we love to change, even if it means they grow away from us. And I think, for love to last, there should be no pecuniary dependency of one upon the other. Dependency poisons love. It is true, as long as women are so poorly educated that they cannot make money, men will have to take care of them. But I can’t regard these arrangements as satisfactory. I believe we should reconsider them.”

LXIII

GLUED INTO MY SCRAPBOOK ARE FOUR PARAGRAPHS
from four different newspapers; they report the official dissolution of the Second San Francisco Committee of Vigilance on August 18, 1856. To be extra careful, I stayed at Jeptha’s house two days longer before creeping quietly out, after dark, with Jeptha as my escort. He took me as far as Portsmouth Square, and I walked the rest of the way alone. It was a delight just to feel the wind on my face. I walked to my house, turned the key, and opened the door, hearing small creatures scurrying away. When I investigated the next day, I found that rats had broken into sacks of flour and sugar in the kitchen. Two ground-floor windows had been forced open. The wine, whiskey, and perfume were all gone. The sheets had been stripped from several beds. Someone had defecated on a carpet and urinated on a pile of dresses that had been dragged out of the closets apparently for this purpose. It was unsystematic, and looked like the work of petty thieves and young boys.

Lewis joined me about a week later. All the people who had been sought by the vigilantes could come out of hiding, because none of us were wanted for any crime; we had been hunted merely as undesirables by men who held themselves superior to the law. I immediately began to rebuild my business. Though the vigilantes and the men whose election
they supported had made a great noise about closing the gambling houses and the brothels, this never happened. We continued our operations, paying different men for protection.

On a sunny day one year later, I went down Montgomery Street in an open barouche with several girls who had come to me from New York and New Orleans. On my left was Georgette, who was slender with a childlike face. Men who enjoyed soiling purity appreciated her, yet under her doll-like exterior she was a careful girl, conscious of the dangers of her profession, determined to be an old woman one day. On my right was Suzette—the very one I mentioned at the beginning of this narrative, who was to take poison in a Five Points dive some years later. In those days, she had such a tiny waist that she would not have worn a corset if it had not given men such pleasure to see her in it. She gave good value in bed and was a gold mine for me, and was excessively generous to any invalid, bum, or other girl feeling blue. She grew angry only at injustice, and even then forgave readily. When I suggested that she ought to withhold more of herself, she agreed vehemently, like a drunk swearing to give up the bottle come next Monday, and I foresaw everything, but there was nothing I could do except be glad I wasn’t like that. In the backseat were Jocelyn, Michelle, and Francesca (or, as we also called her, Mrs. King), each splendid in her own particular way.

Men on the wooden sidewalks tipped their hats, leering, sighing, gawking. I wore black, with a lace veil. My girls wore white and held parasols. Rosy-cheeked, as sweet as cream, as fresh as flowers: ordinary men could dream of one day being able to afford them, as you might hope one day to live in a Venetian palazzo. The barouche slowed. “Girls, all of you, stand, smile, keep your balance.” We rolled down the street like a float in a parade. “Behold, you citizens of Sodom! Look, you misshapen gnomes and hunchbacks. This is beauty. This is why you must become rich.”

Children followed us. From a basket at my feet I showered them with little bags of zanzibars, candied almonds, and polished pennies.

Snarling wives snapped at their men and curled up the corners of their lips, showing purple gums and sharp dog-teeth. “Hello, you crones and charwomen!” I wagged my finger. “How good you are, how hard you labor, and for nothing, nothing! How life mistreats you. But you like it, don’t you? Do you scrub floors? Would you like to come to our house
and scrub the floors? And wash our clothes? They need a lot of washing, these white clothes.”

As we neared the
Bulletin
offices, I said, “Girls, sit down, all except Mrs. King,” and when they had obeyed I asked loudly, “Has anyone here seen Thomas King? I owe him money. Where is Thomas King?”

People laughed. Everyone knew what I had done to Thomas King, James King of William’s younger brother. I had found out that his ex-wife, back in Baltimore, was a prostitute. It was true! Ned McGowan had published it in the
Phoenix
, the newspaper he had started in Sacramento City, and all the San Francisco newspapers except the
Bulletin
had picked up the story, whereupon, to almost universal delight, posters suddenly appeared all over town declaring that Belle Cora had offered a thousand dollars plus the price of the first-class steamship ticket to Mrs. King if she would be the new attraction at my house on Pike Street. Which was also true, and fortunately she turned out to be pretty.

I was still here: thriving, mocking my enemies, and making a display of myself in ways appropriate to a parlor-house madam. People spoke of it as Belle Cora’s revenge; but it was a paltry revenge. Men who had killed my Charley were in barbershops having their faces lathered, in opera houses applauding the show, at picnics tossing their babies into the air. If I had been able to murder them all I would not have hesitated, and I often imagined it; but I was not going to do it, any more than Jeptha was going to walk into the U.S. Congress and pick a fight with the man who had beaten Charles Sumner. Revenge on such a scale requires a specialist.

I BOUGHT A SMALL COTTAGE
between Happy Valley and Mission Dolores. Jeptha and I would each of us separately make our way there on horseback. A miner had owned it before I did. There was a vegetable garden in the back, which a local man tended in exchange for most of the product, with manzanita in the yard and huckleberries growing close to the house. Traveling to and from the cottage, I dressed in trousers and a frock coat. I would arrive first and change into a house dress. When Jeptha came on his horse, I would be standing in the doorway like a wife. We met more often than we used to.

We enacted a simple life and daydreamed about it, but the moment we took these daydreams seriously we were confronted by enormous
obstacles, mostly of my making. He would have had us leave California and start a life fresh somewhere else—in Oregon, perhaps, or Australia. He would give Agnes the house, and she could stay in it or sell it, as she pleased. She had told him many times that he was free to go, she could get on without him; he would take her at her word. Naturally, wherever we went, we would start out poor; we couldn’t live on the money I had amassed by helping young girls destroy themselves. My fortune must be given to charity.

I did not like to argue with him, but it was all impossible. He was wrong about himself if he thought that, with his overactive conscience, he could leave Agnes, now so fragile, to make her own way. As for me, surely he knew better, and it was thoughtless of him to make me say it: I could never do what he proposed. It suited me to be a madam. I did not envision stopping. If I did stop, I would keep my fortune. I would never willingly become helpless again, unable to assist my friends and hurt my enemies. I wanted, one day, to be an influence in Frank’s life. I would need money for that.

Besides, I
had
Jeptha, the man I had loved since I was a child—loved not in friendship and kindness, as with Charley, but through and through, down to the soles of my feet, with my heart and my womb and everything. He was here with me. It was not perfect, to be sure, but the life he had in mind would not have been perfect, either. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too, and it seemed to me that I could.

I would tell him, “We shouldn’t waste our time arguing.”

And he would say, “What do you want? Do you really want me just to take pleasure with you, and pretend with you, and not care what you really think and do?”

“Yes, that sounds lovely; let’s do that,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. I wanted him to try to save me; and a part of me, though perhaps not enough of me, had always hoped that he
would
break down every barrier in my heart and make a good woman of me, make me, if not a Christian, at least a better person, less vengeful, more scrupulous, more like him. But, as he had told me aboard the
Juniper
, I was a hard case. I needed special attention.