Belle Cora: A Novel (97 page)

AND SO I HAVE SURVIVED TO WRITE THESE PAGES
, and the years have passed, and the red slayer thinks he has slain nearly everyone who has ever mattered to me.

Lewis married Jocelyn. They bought a farm in Ohio, and he lived to see the funerals of three grandchildren. Four others were still young enough to enjoy his stories of the Gold Rush and the Comstock Lode. One night, he and Jocelyn were woken by a clamor from the kitchen. He pulled on his trousers and went downstairs, with Jocelyn behind him yelling, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and a Swedish farmhand shouting, “De barn! De barn!” A lantern had tipped into the hay. Soon every adult on the farm was hunting for pails; they were filling them with water and bringing them to the blaze. Lewis alone went into the barn, first flinging a blanket onto an old mare’s head and leading
her to the door. He returned with the same blanket and rescued the workhorses, taking all six, one by one, to safety. When he came out the last time, his clothes were on fire, and the farmhands threw pails of water on him. Then he got up and went to save the cows. The hands, shamed or maddened by his bravery, began to follow his example and risked their lives to help him save the cows. The Swede shouted, “De colts! We forgot de colts!” Though it was clearly too late to save them, Lewis went in, and the roof fell in on him, and that was that. He was sixty-eight.

Robert and Amanda had five children. Two, Rosemarie and May, died in infancy—within a week of each other—of diphtheria; two more, Solomon and Stephen, died in youth of scarlet fever; one, Robert Jr., who survived the scarlet fever, had a rheumatic heart and was never strong, and died, a bachelor, at the age of thirty, in 1881. Robert, heartbroken, died the year after that, and in 1883 it was Amanda’s turn. Edward, who had lost his leg to a minié ball in the West Woods at the Battle of Antietam, died alone in a small apartment on Great Jones Street in New York City in 1884.

Agnes died in 1902 in Monterey, survived by her second husband. She was childless. I had seen her fairly frequently over the years, the intervals between my visits growing shorter until, during her last year, when she was ill, I saw her every week. I miss her every day.

In Livy and Patavium, the tombstones read:

Evangeline, who had married and moved to Wisconsin, died there in 1898 and is buried in her husband’s family plot, beside him and three of their children who died in infancy. Several other children survived.

My enemies have all fled to the spirit realm. William T. Coleman discovered a mountain of borax in Death Valley, adding to his already considerable fortune, and then lost everything in the Panic of 1887. His physician ascribed his death six years later to “a general breaking up of the vital forces.” Sam Brannan, also broke, died in 1889, in Escondido, California. He was seventy.

MISS PEABODY
,
^*
WE HAVE ASSEMBLED
an impressive tower of paper together, telling my story. As I exhume these potsherds and dry bones, arguing my case before the invisible panel of as yet unborn judges whom I imagine turning these pages, what amazes me most is how often I have managed to surprise myself.

I see things now. I do not see the wonderful plan that we are supposed to comprehend when we are dead. But I do see meaning and connection now in events that had remained for many years stubbornly distinct and random. It goes without saying that if my father had lived and kept me with him, my life would have been very different. But I believe it would have been very different even if he had died
of natural causes. I would have accepted the religion of my forebears in the modified form my new family practiced it, and Agnes and Matthew would both have found me less vulnerable. They protect us, these vast lies the whole community embraces. People are almost always more intelligent than freethinkers realize. If they believe in an absurdity, it is because they know deep down that it is more useful to them than the truth.

As it is, I was thrust off the wide, well-traveled path and into a wilderness, and I saw the underside of the comfortable world that I had known as a child. As, in wars, the great questions of the time are written onto men’s bodies in the form of terrible wounds, so, admittedly in milder ways, arguments about shame and pride, morality, power, and religion were written on my young flesh.

Readers, to some of you I am a monster. Under my roof, many lovely young women were hurried down a road that ended, for an unknown proportion of them, in misery and early death. I claim that I was fair to my girls, but clearly, had I a daughter, I would have moved heaven and earth to keep her feet off that path. This crime is the foundation of my fortune and the ease I enjoy in old age. I do feel sad about that sometimes. But I am very forgiving of human error, and I include myself in the general amnesty.

Do I fear to meet my maker? Of course I do. But no more so than if I had not done all these things. Who can say what is accounted a crime in the heavenly courts? Maybe they reward everything. Maybe they punish you for living to an old age. Maybe no such place exists. When our time comes, each of us will see, perhaps.

I make these defenses to Frank sometimes, when I meet him—usually either in the dining room of this hotel or at some anonymous Sacramento eatery where he is confident no one will recognize him. I tell him: what I did, I had to do. He wasn’t there, so he cannot judge. If I had not acted in ways he disapproves of, he would never have been born, and, whatever the world would think, it is no shame to be the son of Charles Cora and Belle Cora. It is because such blood flows in his veins that he has been successful in his own endeavors. After all, he is far more ruthless than I ever was, and has broken the law in the pursuit of his business interests, so how can he be my judge? I tell him that it is inhuman for
a man to prevent his own mother from seeing her grandchildren, to let them grow up without ever permitting them to see her.

And he says, “I can’t have this. Mother, if you go on this way, I can’t discuss them with you.” I promise to be good, and drop the subject, and I beg him to tell me about the grandchildren. “No,” he says airily. “No, I don’t think so. No, I’m not in the mood. Next time. Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you’re writing.”

“What book?” I say. Then: “Oh, I know what you mean. I’m not doing that anymore. I couldn’t finish. I’m too frail now to go outside and make the observations.”

“What was it about again?”

“Wildflowers of northern California,” I say.

He smiles and says, “You’re lying.”

I don’t think he knows, not really. Not yet.

In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expressed myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type-writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it. I enjoy your company, and I feel that we have become friends, perhaps because I have confided so many of my secrets to you.

Just now I’m tired. Oh, where have they gone, where have they gone to? Their voices are in the wind over the Gobi Desert and the China Seas; other men and beasts breathe the air that once inflated their lungs; in the place where mobs of terrified women ran carrying babes in arms down to the harbor, while the sky rained black ash, two thousand years later there are only the ruins and the dry dust and tourists with guidebooks, their minds already looking forward to their dinners. Go now; go and type it; come back on Tuesday. I’ll be ready then, but in the meantime I plan to spend the next few days in quiet conversation with the shades of my beloved dead.

Belle Cora
is, in the words we sometimes see at the start of a movie, “inspired by a true story.” Since this is a highly elastic formula, which applies to
Alice in Wonderland
and
Treasure Island
, readers may welcome a more precise accounting of the proportions of fantasy and truth in this book. Though Belle Cora was a real person, she did not write a memoir; so it was not published by the Dial Press in the 1920s or the Obelisk Press in the 1930s or a Sandpiper Press in the 1960s, and nobody named Arthur Adams Baylis wrote the foreword. I have treated a historical figure as if she were a product of my imagination, providing her with a childhood, youth, family, husbands, lovers, and death that are in conflict with the handful of known facts about Belle Cora.

On the other hand, the major public events of the novel, the fires and earthquakes, William Miller’s prediction of the Second Coming, Charles Cora’s trial, the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, even E. D. Baker’s speeches, are true, and I have tried hard to honor the historical novelist’s implied promise of accuracy concerning props and manners. I attribute all mistakes and anachronisms either to the imperfect memory of Mrs. Frances Andersen, writing many years after the events she describes, or to stenographic errors by Miss Margaret Peabody.

For convincing corroborative details, I have relied on the scholarship of many serious historians. I wish to give special notice to Sheila Rothman’s
Living in the Shadow of Death
, important for the behavior of Belle’s mother in Book One; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s
Gotham
and Tyler Anbinder’s
Five Points
for the New York passages. For the underground sexual culture of antebellum America and in particular of New York City, I drew on Patricia Cline Cohen’s
The Murder of Helen Jewett
, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s
Rereading Sex
, Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s
City of Eros
, and Christine Stansell’s
City of Women
. For the trip around Cape Horn I used Oscar Lewis,
Sea Routes to the Gold Fields
. My depiction of Gold Rush–era San Francisco owes much to Roger W. Lotchin,
San Francisco, 1846–1856: From Hamlet to City
, and I recommend this book to anyone who wants a realistic picture of the urban politics Mrs. Andersen
drastically oversimplifies. For readers wishing to know more about the actual Belle Cora, the most complete account is found in Curt Gentry’s
The Madams of San Francisco
. The version most sympathetic to Belle is provided by Pauline Jacobson, in a series of articles which were written, ironically enough, for the
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin
, the newspaper founded by Belle’s enemy, James King of William. These articles were reprinted in
City of the Golden ’Fifties
, a collection of Jacobson’s writings about early San Francisco.

I would like to acknowledge, before anyone else does, that the death of Lewis Godwin closely resembles the death of Henry Fleming in the story “The Veteran,” found on pages 324–328 of the 1977 edition of
The Portable Stephen Crane
. The quotation on the gravestone of Matthew Moody and his wife is from 2 Samuel 1:23, and also appears on the last page of
The Mill on the Floss
.

The literal translation of François Villon’s “Ballad of Dead Ladies” was found, unattributed, on the website
Bureau of Public Secrets
, created by the writer and translator Ken Knabb. I left out the famous tagline because I wanted to make the poem sound less familiar, and give greater prominence to the list of dead ladies.

Before I had written fifty pages of
Belle Cora
, I started forcing the manuscript on anyone too polite to say no. Among the early readers I would like to acknowledge are Nancy Culp, James Radiches, David Rosaler, Helene Rosaler, Barbara Samuels, and Sarah Sands. I would like especially to thank Elizabeth Meister, who met with me for hours each week to discuss the first drafts of every chapter in Books One to Three.

I became acquainted with Dorian Karchmar, the world’s best literary agent, in the following manner: One Saturday, when my neighborhood Starbucks was very crowded, she asked me if it was okay to sit at my table. She sat down and took a big fat manuscript out of her bag and started to work. After a short conversation (I asked: “Are you an editor?” She replied: “A literary agent.” I said: “What a coincidence …”), she handed me her card. For several months thereafter when she came in to grab her morning coffee, she would ask me how it was going, urging me to take my time and make it good—“You’ve got one shot.” Later she nursed the book along with sensitive editorial guidance, and finally, in the spring of 2008, she had, it seemed to me, every editor in New York City drop what they were doing to read my novel.

In that awful season of bankruptcies, desperate mergers, and dying bookstore chains, only Doubleday’s Alison Callahan had the vision to ask me to complete Belle’s saga in one volume, gambling on an unfinished work by an unknown author, and later, she had the patience and fortitude to guide me through many drafts.

I owe more than I can ever express to my wife, Maxine Rosaler, who has always been my first reader, giving me moral support, exacting criticism, and love while I crossed and recrossed the floor shaking my head, breaking pencils, and telling her that she didn’t know what she was talking about, though we both knew full well that I would come around to her view the next day. Whenever during the composition of
Belle Cora
I needed a model of an unconquerable spirit, I had only to look across the breakfast table.