Frog Music (42 page)

The men aren’t even following, she realizes at the corner; they’ve stayed laughing by their fire. “So long, Lulu,” one of them roars after her.

She stumbles down Dupont in case they change their mind. Another fire patrol rattles past, men with hatchets and ladders hanging off the wagon. Patrolmen clattering by on wild-eyed horses. One shoe’s worse than none, Blanche concludes after two blocks. When a half-grown boy brushes past her and tries to squeeze her breast, she pulls her mule off and hurls it at him.

She’s not safe on these streets. The House of Mirrors? Never again. Her mind scrabbles for other addresses. Low Long? Blanche threatened to set the law on him yesterday. And besides, he and his new renters will be boarded up tightly, tonight of all nights. Durand? But the restaurant owner knows Blanche as the cracked
salope
who taunted a grieving old man at the graveside this afternoon. Maria? How gratefully Blanche would throw herself on the one-eyed hag’s mercy if only she knew where Maria lived. So it’s come to this. Blanche has nowhere to go, no one in this whole city who’ll take her in.

Panting with agitation, she picks the next alley and checks to make sure that it’s quite dark before she ducks in. So small, it’s more of a drain, and it smells like one too. Blanche edges behind a leaning pile of rotting planks and hunkers down. Arms tight around herself. She can smell brandy on her clothes, the slime of vegetables, ash from the fires.

At least she got away from the rioters before they could finish their celebrations by riding her until she was torn apart. At least she’s not trapped in that burning laundry like those Chinese who refused to make a sound, if they were really there. If Blanche wasn’t just imagining what she heard.
Count your blessings, Blanche. Count your goddamn blessings
.

Her ears attend to the distant pandemonium. She watches the bright end of the alley for the silhouettes of men. Something goes by in a flash. A high-wheeler? Her heart hammers. It wasn’t Jenny. Blanche doesn’t believe in ghosts. She shuts her eyes so she won’t see it again. Squeezes them closed, wrapping the darkness around her.

VIII
WHEN THE TRAIN COMES ALONG

Blanche doesn’t exactly wake when the pitiless sunrise pries her eyelids up on the seventeenth of September, because she hasn’t exactly slept in this nameless alley, or so it seems to her—but there are gaps in her memory of the night. What’s bothering her most, she finds, is hunger. Not her dead friend and the impossibility of proving who killed her, her lost baby and the men who stole him, the rioters who snatched almost three hundred dollars from her last night, her lack of a home and clothes, her having no earthly idea what to do next … No, it’s breakfast that presses on her mind. How to rustle up breakfast.

Blanche pounds her numb thighs to rouse them. She wipes her face on the slightly cleaner inside of her wrecked pink dress and struggles to her feet.

Shoeless, filthy, and broke, she can’t pass for anything other than a woman at the end of her rope. Blanche could probably find a stranger to buy her a drink—which comes with food—at one of the City’s free-lunch places, except that they don’t open till eleven on Sundays and Blanche is dizzy already. So she starts walking, picking her way carefully along the sidewalk to avoid putting her stockinged soles on a shard of glass. Men throng by, bent under bundles and baskets on the now-illegal poles. There’s no day of rest in Chinatown.

Of course Blanche remembers some of the names of
michetons
who’ve paid high for a night with her. She could seek one out and send him a tear-smeared note saying that she was attacked by the mob last night and needs to throw herself on the mercy of the most honorable man she knows. That should drum up enough for a new outfit and a room, at least. That’s how Blanche la Danseuse would get herself back on her feet this morning.

But this Blanche stumbles on, weighed down by self-pity, and self-contempt too, because it feels as if every bad thing that’s happened to her in the last month has been her fault. The sky’s turned a strange pale gray that doesn’t make the air any cooler. Blanche wipes the humidity off her face with her sleeve. She’s walking for the sake of keeping moving, the way Jenny used to do, but with feet already beginning to blister.

As she limps along, Blanche torments herself with plans of how she’d spend those two hundred and eighty-two dollars if she had them back. (If only she’d waited another minute at the House of Mirrors and hid the money in her corset instead of carrying it in her bag, like some naive girl, for the first muscled
con
to grab.) Clothes, a room—no, a whole apartment of her own, with one key to the door. If she had all that, if she looked like a woman of substance, she’d sweep into Detective Bohen’s office every morning from now on, demanding to know what he’d discovered about the
macs
and their movements. She’d hire half a dozen sleuths of her own to comb the City for a baby boy with a turnip forehead and his father’s slim eyebrows.

She’s almost at Townsend, she notices; the South Pacific terminus.

Blanche goes in and hovers near the ticket desk, trying to give the impression that she’s waiting for a friend. She knows—having once had plenty of cash—that when rich folks pay for things, they sometimes drop coins, and they don’t look very hard for them if they’re small ones. And after five minutes of shuffling and scrutinizing the dusty ground, she does find a quarter. Blanche lurches to the nearest Mexican stall and buys beans and coffee. Helps herself to half a bowl of mushroom ketchup too, while the owner’s looking away, because who knows how long this breakfast’s going to have to last her? She’s on the bottom rung now.

Her stomach’s full but Blanche still feels awful. Her head’s in a pincer grip. No hat, no parasol, nothing to put between herself and the sun. Her nose is full of the reek of chlorine from the boxcar where they’re fumigating the outgoing luggage and mail sacks. She stares at the black silhouettes of the trains. The last time she was here, two days ago, she was coming back from San Miguel Station with a fresh graze on her cheek.

“Whoa!” There’s a busker singing, shuffling by the barrier. The same black man Blanche failed to give a coin to yesterday? No, younger, and no brand on his ashy cheek, just streaks of sweat.

When the train comes along
,

When the train comes along
,

I will meet you at the station

When the train comes along
.

Every time Blanche hears a song now, she feels Jenny behind her shoulder, listening, commenting, memorizing.

If my mother ask for me
,

Tell her death done summons me
;

I will meet you at the station

When the train comes along
.

“Passengers for the Espee, Espee, South Pacific to San Jose,” a ticket-seller’s calling tiredly.

A ragged line forms. A man in a top hat gives Blanche a curious glance.

She looks down at her grubby stockinged feet and feels herself flush. On an impulse, she flutters to the gentleman’s side. “Sir? Pardon me for disturbing you …”

“Move away, miss, unless you got a ticket,” the ticket-seller warns her.

But she clings to the passenger’s smooth-sleeved arm. “I’m trying to get home to San Miguel Station.” Why did Blanche say that? It just came out, as if it were true. “In all the commotion last night—my bag—”

“San Miguel Station?” the gent repeats with interest, hanging back as the other passengers push past. “The site of the murder?”

Blanche improvises. “It was … it took place in my father’s saloon,” she whispers.

His eyes bulge.

“I was called to the City to give evidence at the inquest, you see, and some awful fellows snatched my bag, and now …”

“First class for this young lady,” he calls, clicking his fingers for the ticket-seller and pulling out his wallet.

She was hoping for cash, but a ticket’s something, at least. She might as well sleep on a train as in a stinking alley.

“You must tell me all,” he says in Blanche’s ear.

Her gorge rises. She’d rather give him a below-job in the lavatory, frankly. But if it’s sordid details he wants in return for his fifty cents, fine.

She shares a cushioned bench with the man and spins him a garbled version of Mary Jane McNamara’s week; shows him the little scab on her right cheekbone and blames it on a bullet that came through two walls.

Dizzy, Blanche asks for a dipper of ice water from the refreshment cart, but the gentleman insists on pouring her a jot of whiskey from his own flask instead. Then he takes great pleasure in buying her a peach and a bag of nuts. “Sugar candy too?”

She thinks of the Industrial School, and the candy Jenny used to throw over the fence to those miserable boys. The varieties on this cart all look unappetizing to Blanche, but she supposes children’s tastes are different, especially if they’re living on a reformatory diet. So she chooses a sachet of clove-flavored wafers, brownish lozenges printed with women’s faces, and pinkish objects called Conversation Candies with cryptic messages right on them:
Married in Satin, Love Will Not Be Lasting
.

When she can bear no more of the kind gentleman, Blanche excuses herself “to freshen up.”

In the corridor, two of the black porters are chuckling together. They hush at Blanche’s approach and move off down the train in different directions.

She stares at the window. Spots on the sooty glass: raindrops! It’s been months. Oh, a good storm cracking this leaden sky, that would be something …

In the next carriage, an Italian’s singing a snatch of “Voi Che Sapete,” blithe and off-key. Blanche dozes for a minute, leaning again the window.

Then wakes from some muddled dream of a baby with no face. P’tit. How long will she dream of him? If Blanche just knew she’d never see him again … She almost wants it. No! It’s just that the waiting, the not knowing—that’s the worst of all.

She can’t shake off the things Madame Johanna said last night. The image she showed Blanche, like a reflection in a tarnished, buckled mirror: the Lively Flea, a thoughtless pleasure-seeker who farmed her baby out to strangers and would have been relieved to hear he was dead.
No, that wasn’t how it was
, Blanche wails in the privacy of her head,
that was never how it was—

She can’t prove it. There’s no judge to whom she can justify her mistakes.

Here’s the question: If Blanche is such an unnatural, rotten-to-the-core bitch of a mother, shouldn’t she be able to forget P’tit now?
Everyone’s replaceable
, according to Madame. Forget his unsmiling face, his translucent ears, that doorknob he—goddamn it! The knob’s lost too. For nine days she’s been carrying it around in the bottom of the carpetbag the rioters pulled out of her arms last night. Blistering tears blind her.

The silhouette of the Industrial School rears up on the far left. Blanche remembers her candies and roots in her pocket for the paper sack. Wrestles with the window. Humid air blasts her face. The fence, here comes the fence, but no boys. Where are the boys? Blanche needs to throw these candies to them but—

Sunday,
satané
Sunday. What, do they lock the kids in their cells right through the Sabbath?

Blanche flings the fat bag anyhow, for Jenny.

Instead of sailing over the fence, it hits the wire and rebounds into the dust. What a pathetic throw. Now the boys will only be taunted by the sight of the bag. Will one of them be able to reach through with a hoe or a stick and hook it, retrieve the chalky disks and lozenges before the insects swarm them? Will the second boy punch the first, snatch his hoe from him? Will Blanche’s dumb gesture lead to nothing but fights, or will a single imprisoned boy get a taste of sweetness and know somebody cared just enough to throw him a blasted candy?

San Miguel Station coming up now. Blanche has no good reason to get down there, today or ever again. She could just stay on the train and try to nap before the conductor throws her off in some faraway town …

Instead, she hobbles down onto the tiny platform. A face in the window, the gent who bought her the ticket. His hand up in an excited gesture. Blanche doesn’t wave back.

The morning of Thursday, the fourteenth, Blanche wakes late with a sore head in the front room at the Eight Mile House. The bed empty beside her, as smooth on that side as if the sheets have never been touched. As if what happened last night between her and Jenny was just a figment of her filthy imagination.

The day’s sliding away from Blanche already.

Blanche tries to remember how drunk she was last night. About as drunk as usual. About as impulsive. About as whorish.
If you can remember any of it
, she’s heard it said,
you weren’t that drunk
.

McNamara’s nightshirt, folded on the bureau. Could Jenny have gone back to the City already? Did she leave first thing this morning, or in the middle of the night, right after Blanche lost consciousness? Could Jenny not even look her in the eye today?

But when she slides her fingers under the mattress, she finds the Colt. And when she looks under the bed, she glimpses the sack of frogs Jenny caught yesterday on Sweeney Ridge.

Blanche puts on a fresh white bodice over her mauve skirt—as if what she wears even matters here in San Miguel Station. She manages to wheedle some coffee out of Ellen McNamara, but it tastes burned. She sits in an old rocking chair on the porch, holding her cup.

“It wasn’t half this hot last summer,” she mentions to Ellen when the woman steps out with a basket of wet sheets.

A look of contempt from the Irishwoman. “Sure a summer like this has never been known.”