Frog Music (25 page)

“Soup,” Ernest reminds her, jerking his head toward the street.

It’s the tone that pushes Blanche over the edge. She stares at Ernest. “Whose apartment—whose damn building do you think you’re living in?” she demands.

His eyes flare, then slide to Arthur.

Who’s looking up now, with eyebrows that cut arcs in the knobbled mask of his face. “My friend here,” he says quietly, “has saved my life by risking his own while you’ve been playing at motherhood.”

“Playing?” She screeches the word.

He winces, holds up one misshapen hand. “But what’s past is past. What worries me is that you’re so besotted with this baby, you seem to have forgotten the need to earn a living.”

Ernest is nodding like a puppet. “It must be more than three weeks since she’s danced at the House of Mirrors,” he points out.

“You know why I won’t go back to that bitch,” says Blanche, addressing Arthur only. “Besides, I don’t need Madame to peddle my
cul
for me.”

He shrugs, a movement that she can tell pains him. “That’s the spirit. So why don’t you go ahead and peddle it yourself?”

“The chamber pot’s not empty yet, is it?” she demands.

“It’s certainly not full.”

“I thought you preferred to live for the day,” Blanche mocks.

“Arthur prefers to live in style,” Ernest tells her.

“Oh,
he
does? You mean you both do, and at my expense.”

Arthur clears his throat exhaustedly. “Let’s stick to practicalities. Why haven’t you looked up some of the silver men? Or that railroad fellow, or that big Sicilian—what’s his name, Lament? Lemon?”

He knows Lamantia’s name perfectly well. “I’ve been busy looking after your son,” says Blanche.

“Ticktock, ticktock,” murmurs Arthur. “Let’s not forget”—with a rueful, spasmodic gesture at himself—“how fast looks can be lost.”

Get out of the room
, Blanche tells herself. Ernest can fetch their
satané
soup.

She stamps her way into the bedroom, baby on her hip. Her room, or it used to be, before it had the reek of death. She pushes the window ajar and takes some long breaths. Arthur’s inching back from the very brink, she reminds herself. He has a right to be bitter. No wonder he doubts her love, considering. She does love him, of course she loves him; Blanche has loved Arthur since she was old enough to know what the word meant. Their fondness has just gone temporarily astray. These are not ordinary times.

“Look,” she says, staring down at a passing cart, “horsies.”

But P’tit’s turning his head away from the window, sniveling again.
“Chut, chut,”
Blanche hushes him, trying to make her voice sound more fond than weary.
Besotted?
What a joke, when Blanche is often as maddened by this baby as by a sliver under the skin.

Mothers in the street who caress their children—they may all be faking it, it occurs to her now. Like the girl in the story who was forced to open the door to the frog, let him feed off her plate, even allow him into her bed. The horror of it: the slime trail across the sheets.

All week, heat continues to fill the apartment like an invisible gas. Blanche’s clothes seem to soak through the minute she puts them on. Ernest comes and goes, reeking of strange smoke; he’s burning all the sheets and cloths in an oil drum in the street outside. Arthur shuffles around or lies in the bedroom in more or less speechless convalescence, fingers locked in his armpits to prevent them from scratching the remaining scabs.

Blanche is always yawning. Always on the verge of sleep, but P’tit won’t let her have more than an hour at a time; it’s the heaven she can never quite reach.

Soon all Arthur’s scabs have fallen off. Ernest’s steamed the bedroom so thoroughly that it reeks of sulfur, and the bedding’s all new, but Blanche is still afraid to sleep in there somehow. She tells herself that she might disturb the convalescent if she brushes against him in the night, and she stays on the sofa, beside P’tit’s trunk.

One evening, the seventh of September, Arthur asks if there’s any wine, and Blanche fills his glass, as courteous as a stranger. If they’re very careful, she believes, they should be able to edge their way back to where they were. Before the smallpox, before Blanche went to Folsom Street, before Jenny Bonnet and her questions. (Jenny hasn’t turned up in a week, not since that walk they took, that sticky evening when Blanche didn’t know if Arthur was going to live or die. That’s the sort of friend Jenny is, Blanche reminds herself; no more to be counted on than a leaf on the breeze.)

Arthur dresses to the nines tonight—shakily, with Ernest tying his cravat for him, and doing his pearl waistcoat buttons, and hanging his gold watch just so. When Arthur practices a smile, the effect is grotesque. Still blackly forested all over his leprous face, because Ernest won’t let him shave yet.

Blanche is not invited. She doesn’t even know where the
macs
are going. She wonders whether Madeleine will be with them tonight. The woman has to be pushing thirty, but she’s still angel-faced, Blanche thinks with a twinge of envy. Being saddled with a baby, Blanche feels as if she doesn’t quite count as a woman anymore.

A sudden loud crack: another blasted lamp! Blanche spots the one with the shattered chimney and hurries over to blow the flame out. Cleaning the burners, that’s one of those tasks that don’t get done now. Blanche has assured all the lodgers that Arthur’s no longer contagious, but they look askance at her if they pass her on the stairs, and Gudrun still refuses to step across the threshold.

Instead of falling asleep as he should this evening, P’tit gets more and more frantic. Returning from the lavatory, Blanche finds him on his feet—he’s hauled himself up by one of the sofa buttons, of all things. She supposes a proper mother would be proud of him, and for a moment she tries to be. But one of the many things about babies that nobody told her is that every incremental advance makes them harder to handle. And the next moment he falls hard, of course, walloping his shoulder on the floorboards and then honking like some clubbed seal.

Blanche picks him up and props him, sitting, against some cushions. But before she can get away, P’tit is clawing himself to his feet again, heaving himself up on her brown polka-dot skirt like a sailor climbing rigging. Or, no, like Quasimodo straining at the ropes of the great bells …

She disengages his fingers. “Hold that,” she says, standing him up against a table and pressing his small hands around the leg.

P’tit stares at her suspiciously. Blanche steps away, smiling.

He wails even before he topples like a felled tree.

Every time she tries to bed him down in his trunk for the night, P’tit leans over the tin rim as if plotting a jailbreak. Blanche can’t leave him because he might fall right out. She crouches there in the dark room, on the edge of the sofa. “Go to sleep,” she chants softly. “Go the hell to sleep.”

P’tit’s cry goes up a jagged notch, and suddenly Blanche can’t bear the injustice of it. She crouches, putting his goblin face up against hers, and shouts,
“Ta gueule!”

The obscenity makes him freeze for a moment. Massive dark eyes fixed on hers. Then he shrieks even harder, and his hands shoot out. Such an unfamiliar gesture that at first she flinches away from the thickened wrists, thinking he’s trying to throttle her. And then she understands. This is what breaks Blanche’s heart, that even as P’tit’s sobbing with fright, he’s reaching out for her in a way he’s never done before, a way she didn’t know he could. How could the tiny boy want a hug from her right now with the tears she’s caused still dancing on his red cheeks? Who begs for comfort from a tyrant? But P’tit is wrapping his arms around Blanche’s head the way a drowning man might embrace a log.

And if she can’t look after him properly, do this one thing right, then Blanche has no business making a hash of it. She should carry P’tit to Portsmouth Square and set him down on the grass. Walk away, leaving him to the mercies of whoever will take him. Never say she had a baby, never dare to call herself a mother …

The thought makes her squeeze P’tit so tight that he howls even louder. She couldn’t walk away. Not now, not ever.

Pressed against her, belly to belly, P’tit clamps his bowed legs around her, and his head takes refuge on her collarbone.

“‘There’s a good time coming,’” Blanche croons under her breath, “‘a good time coming,’” and she swings him from side to side. Things must get better, simply because they can’t get any worse.

A shuffling dance, the smallness of him so heavy in her worn-out arms. Like a bareback act, its perfectly timed, smooth sway. She sings, P’tit calms; she sways, he breathes. It seems Blanche’s muscles have already said yes. And this boy is made of her, after all, his bones formed from hers. Unbeautiful, but her own.

Much later, the sharp sound of a key in the door wakes her with a jolt, and she realizes that she and P’tit have been in the deepest, most peaceful sleep, face to wet face, sprawled on the sofa.

“Chérie?”

What’s Arthur been drinking that’s made him sound fond of her again? She extricates herself from P’tit’s small limbs, sits up, and dresses her face with a smile, blinking, because Arthur’s turning up the lamps.

“We’ve got company,” he remarks, slurring only a little. He straightens his jade tiepin in the over-mantel mirror.

With pocks still clustered around one of his eyes like milk bubbling in a pan, Arthur’s in the mood for company?

“Ernest’s right on my heels, with a friend.”

“Someone I know?” Automatically, Blanche scoops up the baby and carries him into the dark bedroom, pressing his face against her so the light and bustle won’t wake him. As she lays P’tit in the middle of the bed, irritation ticks behind her eyes. She roots out a clean bodice, not able to tell the color, and not caring, because the last thing she feels like doing is primping to charm some
business associate
at this time of night. But she does want to be helpful, to match Arthur’s civility with her own. She’ll be—or at least give a decent impersonation of—the old Blanche.

She squeezes her heat-swollen feet into a pair of mules.

Arthur’s opening a bottle of brandy. In the glare of the salon, Blanche sees that her bodice is light blue. She finds a stain on her skirt and picks at it, but it’s too late to change, and the polka dots will obscure the mark. Well, at least she’s made a visible effort. “So who’s this—”

But she doesn’t get to finish her question because the front door’s opening. Ernest leads the way with the grandiose gestures of a butler; he always hams it up when he’s drunk. The American behind him is short and scruffy, but then most men look so beside Ernest. This one must be important somehow, or surely Arthur, barely out of his sickbed, wouldn’t have brought him home?

“Enchantée,”
cries Blanche, gliding over.

The man is in the Alaskan ice trade, so they run though all the possible jokes about how much he’s making these days. Mind blank, Blanche brings out Ernest’s line about the
nasty residue
left by the manufactured stuff, and the American howls with mirth as if it’s a dazzling bon mot.

Nobody alludes to Arthur’s scarified face.

Blanche swallows a yawn and smiles even harder. When are the men going to get on to the meat of their tedious business and let their hostess slip away?

She excuses herself for a moment. In the dim bedroom, she checks to make sure P’tit is still asleep in the middle of the mattress. His small jaw works as if he’s chewing on gristle.

Then she peeks out; if they seem to have forgotten about her, she won’t go back …

But Ernest’s eyes are watching for Blanche, hawkish. He jerks his head, beckoning.

Arthur throws his arm around her waist and kisses her on the neck as if they’ve been parted for years.

Blanche flinches, and tries to hide it. She reminds herself that he’s cured. No reason to shrink away.

“Be nice to him,
hein
?” Arthur breathes spirituously in her ear. “Give him a dance.”

The euphemism sticks in her craw. “Not now,” she whispers, “not here.” Still smiling in the American’s direction.

“Our room,” murmurs Arthur, with a tiny jerk of his head.

“That’s not what I meant,” she hisses.

“You need a stage?”

“This is where I live.”

“What’s the difference, exactly?”

Blanche doesn’t know how to explain, but there is one.

Ernest refills their glasses, muttering in her ear: “Don’t be a bore.”

The chatter’s died away. The American is grinning at her almost bashfully.

And then Arthur reaches out and finds her left nipple through her bodice. Presses it hard. It works, of course it works, as always, as if he’s a lamplighter opening the valve and igniting the flame. But just because Blanche is getting wet doesn’t mean she’s not getting angry. She slaps his hand away.

“Let’s not stand on ceremony,” he remarks, no longer bothering to lower his voice. “It seems a late hour to play the prude.”

“Especially,” adds Ernest, “when we’ve gone to some trouble to—”

“Trouble?” Blanche interrupts, looking from one to the other. “You bring home some trash off the street and expect me to put on a show for him?”

The American’s going slightly purple.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve been misinformed,” she tells him, with an imperious gesture that starts him backing toward the door.

Arthur snatches at her elbow. “A quarter of an hour, that’s all I’m asking. Now you’ve thrown off Madame Johanna, we need to bring in the trade. My investments require—”

“We?” she exclaims. “There’s no
we
. I carry you—the pair of you—like monkeys on my back.”

Now the American’s looking mortified. “I don’t mean to cause a quarrel.” He’d be out the door by now if Ernest weren’t gripping him around the shoulder with all the conviviality of a guard dog.

Arthur’s asymmetrical eyes narrow at Blanche. “I’ll have you know that I bring in sums, sometimes considerable—”

“A fraction of your keep.”

“What are you, some penny-reckoning housewife?”