Breath and Bones (60 page)

But what maddening people. They had dithered so long about the travel arrangements and assembling box suppers that it was late afternoon before the four of them managed to climb onto a train. The woman would not stop hinting at her physical discomfort and fatigue, yet she refused any easement; the car's other occupants, all well dressed, most of them reading newspapers, books, and magazines, occasionally glanced at her with annoyance. And Albert Viggo—Edouard remembered that Ursula had called her brother Albert, though that first name seemed at odds with his last—smelled so strongly of the chemicals used for corpses that Edouard had to keep the window closest to them open, despite the ash and cinders that flew in.

The wheels roared and the train rocked side to side. Several people dozed, including an infant in a nurse's arms and a man in a green suit who had climbed on at the last minute. There was a woman who looked something like Ursula up ahead, but when she turned her face toward the light it became plain that she was several years older and did not have anything like Ursula's refined facial architecture. Edouard decided to nap.

The train pulled into Fresno City and out again—halfway home. Some miles later, as they were gathering speed, Myrtice cried out in pain. A cinder had flown into her eye.

The Dane, who had been sitting next to Edouard and politely respecting his wish for silence, took down his black bag and opened it. Edouard saw there were no canvases, sketchbooks, or brushes inside, only bottles of those noxious fluids and a few worn scraps of clothing.

“You have given up painting, Mr. Viggo?” Indeed, the man's hands, rummaging among his effects, did not look at all as Edouard imagined an artist's hands would. Surely the stiffened scars would impede the more delicate movements of the brush. Edouard might suspect Viggo to be as much a fraud as his sister—if he hadn't had the evidence of that disastrous painting to prove the man existed.

The man in question fished out a ragged handkerchief and gave it to Myrtice. “I will paint again,” he said, “if there is another death.”

Edouard found that declaration highly peculiar. But artists were known
for unusual behavior and odd aesthetics—second-rate artists perhaps more so than others. Edouard thought incidentally that Albert Viggo looked as if he would make a good sailor or farmer.

Albert Viggo. A. V. But Ursula had given him a different last name—

“I am curious about something . . . ,” Edouard began.

The other man's attention was on Myrtice, who was dabbing at her eye; she would not allow him to search for the cinder. “No, no,” she said, pulling the lid out by the lashes and sliding the cloth underneath in a savage operation particularly exasperating to Edouard, “I can manage.”

Without showing a trace of annoyance, Viggo turned to Edouard. “You have a question? Is it about Ursula?”

Edouard spoke stiffly: “No, Mr. Viggo.” He had in fact made a point of saying as little about Ursula as possible. “I wish to ask about your work. It occurs to me to wonder why you sign your canvases with a—”

He was not able to finish his question. There was a sudden roar, followed by an earsplitting shriek as the brakeman gave a mighty pull. Everything was flung forward. Myrtice landed in Viggo's lap. The black bag hit the back of Edouard's seat, and several bottles broke, soaking his coat and filling the car with overwhelming odors. Screams started up around them; the baby howled.

“What has happened?” cried Myrtice. She clung to Viggo's neck.

Still the machine ground forward, wailing like a dying animal. Now its lament was punctuated with a loud twanging sound. Edouard struggled to tear the coat off his back—the chemicals were burning his skin—while Viggo said calmly, “I believe the rails is going apart.”

It was true. The metal rails split and the train rushed forward, burying its nose in the dirt. The rear cars rushed to catch up. They knocked against the engine and then, with surprising grace, tipped slowly onto one side.

When it was over, Edouard lay in a jumble of limbs with Albert Viggo and Myrtice Goodhouse Black. His face was pressed against the window frame, and Viggo had fallen halfway out. Myrtice was crying. “What happened?” she asked again, and then repeated the question hysterically: “What happened what happened what happened what—”

Far away, someone said: “The Dynamite Gang.”

In the confusion it occurred to Edouard to wonder, irrelevantly, whether the death Mr. Viggo was waiting for might be his sister's.

Nobody will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral
.

H
ELEN
H
UNT
J
ACKSON
, “C
ALIFORNIA
,”
IN
G
LIMPSES OF
T
HREE
C
OASTS

The new Hygeia Springs Institute for Phthisis was now open. Tides of the sick were washing up the mountain, and each train that pulled into nearby Harmsway delivered a new wave bound for the healing waters and fresh air. Famke and Albert stepped off to find that stagecoaches going up the mountain were so in demand that it would be necessary to spend a night in a cramped hotel room.

Albert first chafed at the delay and then decided it gave him an opportunity. He took her in his arms.
Darling, Famke, I—

As if she heard his unspoken words, she turned her face to his for a kiss; but it was just a kiss like countless others they had exchanged, and she began to move against him until the only words he could say aloud were “Hold still.” Then it was he who moved against her, and he kept the unspoken sentence on his lips. But even at the most intimate moment, he could not bring himself to say it. Words might break the new spell he'd fallen under. He thought then of the Winged Victory; and instantly he shuddered and spent, painting Famke's womb in a way that was itself most satisfying to him.

When Albert slid off her, Famke decided it would be safe to move. She rolled as far from Albert as she could and, feeling thwarted herself, did her best . . .
The cottager comes home to find his roof is missing, and he must climb up on top
. . . but somehow it was not enough. The shimmering sense of longing still persisted, though it was not so pleasant now. She wanted that other feeling, the one that Heber and Edouard knew how to give even without
the little stories she told herself. She lay stiff all night, listening to Albert's snores and dodging the limbs that flailed during his dreams. She thought about
The Bride's Prelude
until she was thoroughly sick of it and concluded there was no point mentioning the idea to Albert or anyone.
Just a silly woman
, she thought.
She would probably choose the bird
.

The next morning, the Paradise Hotel lounge was full of hollow-eyed consumptives waiting for stagecoaches, coughing into pocket
crachoirs
and maddening the hotel staff with requests for cold compresses and draughts of now-famous Hygiene water. Famke and Albert claimed a settee at the far side of the room, as far from the patients as possible. Famke tried to nap, while Albert took out an old journal called
The Germ
, which declared itself to contain writings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

“Darling, wake up. I have been thinking of my next painting,” Albert said, thumbing through the pages. “I'd like to do something with wings—an angel, I think. Listen to this poem:

The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even
.

‘Deeper than the depth'—isn't that pretty? And doesn't it just describe your eyes?”

Famke accepted the compliment, nice as it was, with less grace than she might have done if she'd slept. She imagined those words painted around a picture frame, which would of course be gilded—just like the gold bar of Heaven. She had a flash of inspiration. “Maybe I could be leaning out of the picture. You know, over the golden bar.”

Albert thought this over, mouth pursed in a gesture that reminded her of Myrtice. “I don't see how it could be done,” he said finally. “A frame is the painting's limit. But listen to the conclusion:

And the souls mounting up to God

Went by her like thin flames
.

That has some possibilities, doesn't it?”

“Maybe you should write poems,” Famke said. She decided she was tired of discussing art and picked up a copy of
Frank Leslie's
to look at the fashion sketches.

They arrived in Hygiene that evening, to find the hospital's triple towers lit like beacons and the main street awash with patients. Many of these were too weak to walk and had to be lifted into buggies; nurses had come with wheeling chairs to collect others. Famke saw Miss Pym, or someone who looked very like her, hauling away a man with a beard a bit like Heber's but the skeletal body of one of Edouard's anatomical drawings. Some of the worst cases were spitting on the streets, despite an abundance of signs that warned them not to: Everywhere she looked, Famke saw disgusting puddles of red and green and yellow. The sight made her start to cough, if only to avoid being ill there and then herself; and the smell of so many sick people sank deeper into her body.

“We must go directly to Mr. Versailles's house,” she said. “Leave your bag at a hotel and bring the portfolio.” She thought of her tranquil white bedroom at Edouard's house, the faded Flower Garden quilt under which she had spent so many restful starry nights. But of course Edouard would not let her sleep there again.

Steering Famke through the chaos toward a likely-looking hostelry, Albert could not have been more pleased. It was as if all their desires were coinciding, and in coincidence were finding perfection. She would win him an opportunity with this Edouard Versailles; these thousands of wealthy patients and their families would see his work; many would commission final portraits by which to remember the dead: The future would be secure. He had never, in the two days that he had loved her, felt closer to Famke.

She cut into his thoughts: “When we get close to the house, we must mind the zebras.” To Albert these were words from a dream. “They can be quite fierce.”

In the tumult, neither Famke nor Albert noticed a few shaggy mountain men, independent miners and hunters, who had come down from their cabins and now stood looking as confused as if they had wandered into a foreign land on a high holy day. They had heard there were now public
women in town, but they had not expected any of this. Neither did Famke see the Asian woman clad in yellow silk and spangles stepping up to greet them, or hear the woman say, “Ten dollar for a look, twenty for a touch . . .” It was doubtful she would have recognized the hundred-men's-wife anyway; but to some, this was already the new meaning of Hygiene.

The Southern Pacific derailment caused a day's delay while the tracks were repaired and the wrecked train hauled away. There were several injuries and one death, and the conductors announced that only the wounded would be removed to Ringsburg, the next town, and lodged there. It took a considerable bribe from Edouard to procure transportation and hotel rooms for himself and Wong and the other two, both of whom looked disapproving about the bribe but accepted the benefits. They all slept tolerably well, and Edouard decided to ask no further questions about Viggo's artwork.

The next morning, when Myrtice and Viggo met Edouard in the hotel's private lounge, they found the mid-California papers were full of the event. “Dynamite Gang's Revenge!” trumpeted the first headline Myrtice saw. She read the article with excitement that increased when she spotted a familiar name.

In a letter mailed to this office, persons claiming to be members of the Dynamite Gang took responsibility for the act. In their missive, the Gang protests a recent Dime Novel and financial success authored by the celebrated correspondent known as Hermes
. Rubble on the Rails,
they aver, is a misrepresentation of their constituents and goals: In politics and philosophy they are anarchists, enraged by the exploitation and careless mutilation of workers in the West's many mines. No women are involved with the group, who announce that they traced the novelist, in the manner of Pinkerton detectives, to that very train. “Let him experience an incident firsthand,” the letter concludes
. . . .