Frog Music (15 page)

Chimneys growing in the distance. The train speeds up as they head down the long grade toward the passenger depot at Third and Townsend. The City’s coming at Blanche like a bullet to the head.

At the terminus, it suddenly strikes her that Arthur could be waiting on the platform, scanning the crowds for her familiar face. Blanche reckons the chances that Detective Bohen has arrested him already are slim to none. But where else can she go today? Should she pick a random town to hide in? If she doesn’t show up at tomorrow’s inquest here in the City, the detectives might put a warrant out for her.

When Blanche gets to her feet, everything goes black for a moment. Now that she thinks about it, she realizes she’s had only a sip of water today.

Her step slows as she moves down the platform toward the gate. Men are stacking a whole freight car full of ice, as neat as masonry, with chaff and sawdust for mortar. She scans the milling crowd for men with bird’s-wing mustaches. She dreads the sight of that lovely sallow face she’s woken up beside every morning since she was fifteen.

And yet … she’s almost disappointed that Arthur’s not here. It feels like a long time since they had their last battle, at the gaming saloon, just a week ago. Blanche shouldn’t have allowed herself the satisfaction of sparring with him that night, she sees that now. Should have fallen to her knees in the pose of some penitent Magdalene and begged him to tell her what he’d done with their son.

So many ways to dispose of a baby. Hand over mouth and nose. A cushion, a blanket. A cord; a ribbon, even. A quick shake or a blow. A fall. A drain, a culvert … Or don’t give him his bottle; that would do it, after a day or two, in this thirsty weather. Just go out, shut the door, and leave him to cry his way to silence. So many quick and simple means to finish off a small life that should probably never have started.

Blanche won’t let the tears come, not in front of this pair of patrolmen displaying their seven-pointed stars for authority as they peer suspiciously into every face for pustules. The smallpox has been spreading through San Francisco since May, so what good do they think it’ll do to examine arriving passengers now?

Outside on Third Street, the sun is dizzying. The push and clamor of the crowds overwhelm Blanche after three days of the silence of San Miguel Station. She finds a pump and bends to drink from it. Only a dribble; the pressure’s low. She thinks of that reservoir she and Jenny saw being gouged out of the hill, up at the back of Sweeney Ridge. It won’t be ready for a while yet. What’ll happen if the City runs dry?

Her throat floods with acid, and she swallows it down. Her arm aches already from keeping the delicate green parasol between her face and the hammering sun. There’s a Mexican slumped against a wall, wrapped in his serape. Funny to think his lot once owned this whole part of the world. A Prussian-looking busker pumping an accordion tiredly.

Blanche wishes she could afford a cab. She has to get hold of some cash today. Instead, she squeezes onto a horsecar going north.

“Terrible hot, ain’t it?” a fellow remarks. “Ninety-five in the shade, they’re saying.”

Blanche tugs down her short lace veil and pretends she hasn’t heard. A little conversation, a little flirtation … so many men think they can get a bit of her for free.

On Market, a Chinese man with a huge bundle of clean laundry tries to get on. But several passengers protest that the linens might be riddled with invisible germs, so the driver moves off without him. This is what plague has brought San Franciscans to, Blanche thinks: flinching from every smell, scrutinizing every face for danger, balking at sharing the same air.

At Morton Street, a couple of worn crib girls squeeze in. Blanche wonders if there’s any truth to the rumor that each one, in her narrow stall, services up to a hundred customers a night. With a small shudder, she looks away.

All along Kearny, folks are cringing away from the glare, crowding to the shady side of the street. Every dive and barrelhouse is spilling over.
Temperance Lemon Cocktails
, offers one awning, but the drinkers loitering under it look half soused to Blanche.

The coupled hacks slow as they haul the horsecar up the slope on its smooth tracks, and the passengers brace themselves. Of all the unworkable spots to build a city, thinks Blanche with exasperation.
If you get tired in San Francisco, you can always lean on it
, she remembers Jenny quipping.

Chinatown smells like a urinal, which Blanche notices only because she’s been out of town. The health inspectors have nailed disinfectant sheets over many more doors, and yellow flags hang like bunting for some canceled New Year. A Nordic-looking man plods up and down with a sign in the form of a gigantic arrow—
F
REE
V
ACCINATION
N
O
M
ONEY
F
REE
T
ODAY
—but he’s not getting many takers, because the Chinese bachelors with braided pigtails down to their hips are lined up outside the herbal shops instead.

Recognizing the square tower of St. Mary’s, Blanche jolts upright. She was heading home without thinking, but 815 Sacramento Street is the last building in the world she should approach today. Her brain’s all rusted up this morning.

As the horsecar creaks past Sacramento, she catches a glimpse of the blue-and-white mansion: the House of Mirrors. Yes, that’s where Blanche needs to go, she decides—for proof of her hunch that Madame Johanna told Arthur where the two women had fled to on Tuesday. How else can Blanche convince the detectives that it’s Arthur who shot Jenny—by mistake, because he was aiming at Blanche, but that’s still murder, no? “Driver,” she shouts, pushing her way down the car, her orange carpetbag snagging on hips and bustles.

She stands at the corner, her head aching and her mouth so dry that she’s not sure she’s capable of speech. A constant stream of Chinese bachelors parts around her, not an empty hand among them. Every man seems to be hauling a bale of shoes, a laundry bag, or a wet basket of sea life writhing on a bed of kelp; Blanche recognizes shrimp, squid, and those snails that always remind her of severed ears. Some of the men are toting their baskets on long sticks over their shoulders—in defiance of the City’s new bylaw criminalizing that tradition, or has nobody told them it’s a crime yet?

Gray’s Undertakers is just a block away, at Dupont. Perhaps Blanche should head straight there, to make sure the—what are they called?—dieners aren’t prettifying Jenny with their little pots of paint. But she finds she can’t bear to, not yet. Her stomach is a tangled knot. She hasn’t eaten anything at all since dinner yesterday evening. (
Splendid stew, if I may say, Mrs. Mac
, Jenny assured Ellen McNamara, though it wasn’t.)

So Blanche turns north, going past a runny-nosed Irish fiddler who can’t be more than ten. Chez Durand, just for half an hour, to gather her strength? It can’t be safe to go where the French go—where a Frenchman might guess he’d find a particular Frenchwoman—but then, Arthur’s hardly going to gun her down in a public place, is he? Even in his current crazed state, the man’s intelligent, and he can’t mean to end up on a gibbet in the yard of the Broadway Jail.

Under the striped awning, the brasserie’s crammed with drinkers. Safety in numbers, Blanche reassures herself, stepping inside. The print of the Champs-Elysées is back up by the door, minus its glass. That’s the only sign that Jenny was ever there.

“If we don’t keep our liquids up,” a female voice is remarking, “we’ll like to expire by lunchtime.”

Blanche hovers at the bar, trying to catch the eye of the owner. It occurs to her that Durand won’t know the news, because it can’t have hit the papers yet; Cartwright must be still working up his story for the
Chronicle
’s afternoon edition.

“Mademoiselle,” says Durand with a nod of acknowledgment, shoving a young man off a stool so Blanche can sit down.
“Qu’est-ce que ce sera?”
His mustache so thickly lank it hides his mouth.

Blanche shouldn’t have come here, not today. She can’t be the one to tell him. She orders a plate of vinegary
choucroute
—the first thing she can think of—and a beer.

At the piano in the corner, a ginger-haired man is thumping an accompaniment for a plump blonde with a Languedoc accent who giggles when she fails to hit the aria’s top notes. Blanche wants to slap her. She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.

When Durand comes over with her order, she looks at it queasily and takes a sip of her beer.

“If you see Jenny, tell her
j’en ai marre
. Enough!” he barks. “Since Wednesday I’ve been waiting. The season’s nearly over, I tell them, it’s halfway through September, time to eat leeks and apples, but they’re still craving their
cuisses de grenouille …
”

Blanche’s mind fixes on the frogs she released by the pond this morning. The small McNamaras licking their singed fingers by the bonfire.

“I’ll get my supply from someone else next spring, if I can’t count on—”

She makes herself break in. “Jenny’s dead. Last night,” she gasps, “down at San Miguel Station. We were—somebody shot her through the window.”

“Bordel de merde!”

Blanche slides off the stool, needing to get out of this place.

Durand shouts in the direction of the kitchen. “Portal!”

A muffled roar comes back.

“Get out here!” he roars. “He won’t believe it from me,” Durand tells Blanche, taking her elbow and pushing her down on the stool again.

The smell of her pickled cabbage turns her stomach.

The long-faced cook comes out, his apron spattered red and brown.

“Tell him,” the
patron
insists.

Blanche repeats her news, leaden.

Portal doesn’t curse or interrogate her about how it happened. Instead, he caves in like a man made of paper. He staggers, he writhes in his employer’s arms, tears flooding down his scarlet face.

Durand keeps kissing the side of his head.

Blanche’s cheeks burn. She pushes her way toward the door, almost reaching it before she remembers her carpetbag and has to turn back to grab it, her eyes low. Portal is still weeping on the bar. These
foutu
Frenchmen!

In Madame Johanna’s parlor at the House of Mirrors a quarter of an hour later, Blanche smooths her blue plaid flounces and tries not to count the minutes. Keeping Blanche waiting is just the widow’s little game, nothing worth losing one’s temper over.

Her stomach growls. She should have eaten that
choucroute
. There’s a fly buzzing intermittently against the window. Blanche arches a little, to ease the strain in her back. Funny how it never ached when she was performing on horseback twice a day or, more recently, doing leg shows in the Grand Salon upstairs.

What was the last one? Almost a month ago now; the Saturday night Jenny rode into her on Kearny Street. After Blanche went to Folsom Street and realized what kind of place Madame had consigned Blanche’s baby to—after she sent back Madame’s note, ripped up—she would have liked to maintain a stony silence and never lay eyes on Madame again, even if it meant forfeiting her pay for her last two performances. But three days ago, when Blanche had to flee town for fear of the
macs
and was desperate for cash, she swallowed her pride and came here for her hundred dollars—and the Prussian had the almighty gall to claim that the debt was the other way around. So Blanche wouldn’t be back here today for any reason less serious than this: she must find evidence that Arthur knew she was going to San Miguel Station. Only when he and Ernest are in jail will she be able to take a breath without terror.

How much longer is the woman going to make her wait?

You came within an inch of death last night
, Blanche scolds herself. Surely she can manage to sit for a quarter of an hour in a quiet room where the thick drapes keep out the worst of the heat and where she knows that she’s not going to be shot at.

The door opens noiselessly. Blanche’s head jerks up.

Madame Johanna, in pearl-gray silk. “Ah, my dear.”

Blanche steels herself.

“You are not looking your best, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Do take some water.” Pouring two small glasses from the carafe. “I trust you’ve come with glad tidings about your little one?”

Blanche is rigid, eyes on the carpet. On Tuesday, why did she let herself complain to Madame about Arthur taking P’tit away? She’s not going to say a word about it today. She can’t trust herself not to burst into tears.

“Well,” sighs Madame. “If the baby’s lost for good, I do hope you feel the whole drama of snatching him away from Folsom Street was worth the candle.”

“I trusted you,” Blanche roars before she can stop herself.

“Indeed you did, to relieve you of a burden so that you could continue to work, more and more profitably, may I add, and live as freely as before.”

“I didn’t know what kind of rat hole you’d stashed—”

“Please don’t waste your time and mine by playing the innocent,” Madame cuts in.

Blanche clears her throat but still her voice comes out as a caw. “I only came here today because of my friend Jenny.”

Madame puts her head to one side. “Jenny. Do I know a Jenny?”

Blanche bets she does: Madame knows everybody, from gentlemen high up in the state government to the least shivering nine-year-old smuggled into the House of Mirrors. “Jenny Bonnet.”

“Ah, the girl with a taste for making a spook of herself in pants?”

Blanche forces herself to ignore that. “She got blown to pieces beside me last night. It was—it has to have been Arthur.”

The pale mouth forms a little O of shock.

As fake as some old diva at the opera, Blanche thinks. How could she have borne this woman for more than a year of her life?

“Did a bullet do this?” asks Madame Johanna, leaning over to explore Blanche’s cheek with one cool fingertip.