Sister Noon (24 page)

Not that Mrs. Putnam was ever one to lose herself in regrets. “The past is only useful as a guide to the future,” she said briskly. She proposed that Lizzie immediately be seen with respectable people. She proposed the long-promised, long-delayed Saturday-night promenade.

“You can invite that Mrs. Wright you’re so taken with,” she offered, which made it impossible for Lizzie to refuse. Though she’d lost the taste for it herself, it would be such a treat for poor Mrs. Wright. The Putnams would fetch them both.

The usual Saturday-night route was a loop that could be walked in either direction—Market to Kearny to Bush to Powell or Powell to Bush to Kearny to Market. Whatever the weather, the streets were full of people. The Salvation Army band sang at one end of Market Street, while at the other, groups of young men gathered to smoke cigars and watch the wind lift the ladies’ skirts.

You might see anyone in San Francisco on a Saturday night. You could buy stocks or snakes. You could buy a pig or a paste necklace or a paste guaranteed to dissolve warts. The Crockers might be walking in one direction and their servants, off duty, in the other. Fast Irish women passed slow Spanish men. There were sailors from the ships of every country in the world and soldiers from the Presidio. There were sweethearts and zealots and labor agitators and mesmerists; there were black Gilbert Islanders, huge Kanakas, turbaned lascars, tattooed Indians, Chinese with their long hair fiercely loose, Italians in fussy shirts with blue sashes. And the whole scene flooded with so much lamplight it was as if they were all onstage together. The very sidewalks seemed made of light.

Lizzie held Mrs. Wright’s arm and tried to describe it aloud. She recognized Mrs. Hallis out promenading with her husband and two married daughters; they nodded
briskly to each other. She saw Myrtle Rolphe freezing out a young man with a fast smile and a gold tooth.

Mrs. Putnam began to talk about the phantom fire engine. The story was getting a good deal of press. A Mr. Tomkinson was suing the fire department for damages sustained on Third and Folsom when a recklessly speeding engine had chased his horses. His driver had lost the reins, smashing his buggy into splinters against a telegraph pole. Mr. Tomkinson was asking for one hundred nine dollars and seventy-five cents in compensation. There were more than a dozen credible witnesses.

Only there’d been no fire on this occasion, and none of the city’s many engines had been at Third and Folsom. After an investigation so exhaustive that Chief Scannell was forced to retire to the country under a doctor’s care, acting Chief Sullivan concluded that Mr. Tomkinson would have to apply for compensation to a supernatural agency. Mrs. Putnam was both pleased and horrified to think there were whole engines of ghosts clattering down the stone pavement on Folsom, carelessly sounding gongs and spooking the horses.

“When you think of all the men who’ve died fighting fires in San Francisco,” Mr. Putnam noted. “Really, the wonder is there aren’t more of these incidents.”

Mrs. Putnam was forced to agree. “But what do you think it means?” she asked. “Is the manifestation a random occurrence or is it a warning we should heed? What a time for omens this has been! Can you ever remember another such, Mrs. Wright?”

Mrs. Wright had been squeezing Lizzie’s arm for the
past few moments. She answered loudly and quickly. “Stuff and nonsense. One of the engines was out and everyone is lying about it to avoid payment. These events can always be readily explained if you remember what liars people are. Especially when money is involved.

“These witnesses you refer to—was there anything supernatural in what they observed? The baying of invisible hounds? The scent of unearthly roses?” Her voice was innocent, but Lizzie could tell Mrs. Wright was goading the Putnams.

Lizzie found Mrs. Wright’s rock-solid disbelief extremely comforting. She might shift about from past to present, but Mrs. Wright kept her feet on the ground. It was also slightly rude. Mrs. Wright did not know the Putnams well enough to contradict them so loudly. Nor was her version appealing to them. “That would involve a massive conspiracy to conceal the truth,” Mr. Putnam pointed out. His posture was stiff, his tone formal.

“Someone somewhere would be bound to talk.” Mrs. Putnam turned to Lizzie. “Don’t you think so?”

Lizzie found that she had no opinion on the subject of supernatural fire engines. Naturally, this pleased no one.

The Putnams began to walk faster, and the distance between the two couples increased. This gap was quickly filled with other people. It could not have been the Putnams’ intention to abandon her, but suddenly Lizzie couldn’t see them anywhere.

A group of Italian sailors walking together, arm in arm, created a phalanx against which Lizzie was forced to give way. A gaunt and rheumy-eyed man staggered
drunkenly toward her, only to find his path blocked by a bosomy, theatrical woman with a serious overbite. “Even today, the women of ancient Egypt are remembered for their beauty. What did they have that you don’t have?” she asked Lizzie. She extended her hand. In it was a small box, inlaid with an ivory ibis. “Something tiny enough to fit in this box. Would you like to open it?”

Suddenly, inexplicably, the woman and the question filled Lizzie with dread. Why had the woman picked her? Did she look the sort to open a box with no idea as to its contents?

Lizzie tried to walk past without answering, and the woman intercepted her again. “Go ahead. Open it.”

Lizzie began to sweat in the cold night air. She moved to the left, pulling Mrs. Wright along so rapidly she careened into a man with a huge black beard and a white top hat. There was the fleshy sound of collision, the smell of whiskey, a small reproachful noise from Mrs. Wright, a large irritated noise from the man.

“What are you afraid of? Only yourself,” the woman with the box shouted after Lizzie.

Lizzie saw the opening of a narrow alleyway and guided Mrs. Wright into it and out of the crush. Several moments were spent in apology and explanation. Mrs. Wright’s hat had been knocked askew and Lizzie straightened it. They began walking again, forward into the alley. Only then did Lizzie look up. The bright glow of streetlamps was gone, and she found herself in a place she’d never been. She was on Morton Street.

The sounds of the Saturday-night promenade fell
away, leaving only their own footsteps. On the left were a dozen small cottages, each with a shallow bay window. In every window a woman sat idly, a smile painted on her lips, and her eyes both staring and unseeing. Instead of dresses, these women wore simple wrappers that would fall away at a touch. Their hair was pinned up in a way that suggested its coming down. The wrappers were in different colors, but otherwise the women looked exactly the same—dark hair, white skin, red mouths.

The dread Lizzie had been feeling doubled, but now she knew what she was afraid of. She feared recognizing a face, some girl they’d sheltered at the Brown Ark. The women were like dolls, waiting for someone to pick them up, move their arms and legs, animate them. She could not take her eyes off them; the women refused to look at her. She thought that what she was seeing was sex, but that it had been made to look like death.

Lines of men drank from flasks and bottles as they waited their turns. In the presence of Lizzie and Mrs. Wright, they fell utterly, eerily silent. A man left one of the cottages, a very young man with barely a beard. When he spotted them he reversed direction and walked ahead so they would see only his back. “Get out of here!” a man who looked to be Lizzie’s age snapped at her. “What can you be thinking?”

This late in her life, it was doubtful Lizzie would ever know what physical passion was. She blamed no one for this; there were things she could have done if she’d chosen to do them. As an adolescent she’d conducted her own solitary investigations until somehow her mother knew.
There was a period when Effie had been told to tie her hands together every night, but it lasted only a few weeks, only long enough to make the point. “I know you’re a good girl,” her mother had said, and Lizzie had chosen to be one.

Once, when she was nineteen, Teddy Sprague had pressed against her in the backyard of his house by the large rhododendron. Later she wished she’d pressed back, but at the time she was merely embarrassed. Perhaps if she’d been beautiful, if he’d spoken first, if it had been more like something in a book, she might have behaved differently. Instead she reacted instinctively. It was a revealing instinct, the instinct of no. Lizzie had instantly known that any shared embrace would leave her feeling exposed, observed. The inner woman would not allow the outer woman to look so foolish.

She’d often told herself she didn’t really mind; she could do without. Other women seemed to dislike it often as not. There was plenty of excitement to be found in music and in books, even a bodily excitement. And then there were so many other pleasures to be had—water on her skin and in her throat, the taste of crab legs with melted butter, the smell of lemons and horses and the sea, the touch of velvet and satin, hills of poppies, Beethoven, blackberries and olives, sneezing and stretching in the sun. She would not allow these ecstasies to seem any bit less than they were. She loved them. The pleasures of the flesh were a gift from God.

None of this belonged on Morton Street. Lizzie tried to imagine a looking-glass alley where men sat in windows and waited for women with money. She pretended she was
entering a door, making a selection, demanding who and what she wanted. Money on the dressing table. The man like a puppet in her arms.

The fantasy was ludicrous. And upsetting. She didn’t have a word for the combination of horror and thrill and buffoonery and sadness it gave her. What did men feel when they did such things? Whom did they pretend to do them to? Why must they do them at all?

“What’s happening?” Mrs. Wright asked. “Why have you stopped talking? Where are we?”

“Lizzie!” Mr. Putnam’s footsteps sounded behind them. “Where do you think you’re going?” He seized her by the elbow.

“Mrs. Wright was getting knocked about by all the people,” Lizzie said. “I was looking for somewhere less crowded.”

“I’ll take Mrs. Wright’s arm, then,” Mr. Putnam said. “Neither of you should be here.” He led them back to Kearny Street and Mrs. Putnam.

“What were you thinking, Lizzie?” Mrs. Putnam asked.

It wasn’t a question, so Lizzie didn’t answer it. Inwardly she was annoyed at the fuss. Wasn’t she a grown woman, and perfectly able to look at the realities of life? At the same time her hands were shaking and she couldn’t make them stop.

“We were on Morton Street,” Mrs. Wright announced to the whole staff the minute Lizzie returned her to the Ark. “Of course, I didn’t see a thing.”

“How very distressing,” Mrs. Lake said.

“How interesting,” said Miss Stevens.

Nell fetched them all a glass of wine and a piece of cold apple pie to help them recover. No experience could have brought more ready sympathy. These are real women, Lizzie told herself. This is where I live, with God, first of all, and then these real women in this real world.

B
ecause she had continued so listless, because since the quarantine had lifted and she’d learnt that Mrs. Pleasant was a communicable disease, she had spent less and less time at the Brown Ark, Lizzie was not immediately informed of Jenny’s piano lessons. She heard of them finally from Ti Wong.

She’d dropped by to give him the new Conan Doyle and was told he was upstairs cleaning the tower room. “I suppose it will be good for his English,” Nell said amiably. “Go on up,” just as if Nell were happy to see her, were the most agreeable of women. How Ti Wong had charmed her merely by almost dying!

Nell had no way of knowing, of course, that the book Lizzie had brought contained cocaine injections, a
wooden-legged convict, and a pair of hideous twins. Even Lizzie hadn’t read it yet. Although Doyle’s previous stories had garnered little excitement and mixed reviews, this was beginning to change. Lizzie felt that combination of validation and annoyance the early reader feels toward anyone coming later. It dampened her own enthusiasm slightly.

Ti Wong was not cleaning the room at all, but was seated, dreamily looking out the cupola window to the street, when she entered. “I saw you coming,” he said. “I saw your tiny, tiny hat.”

He smiled when she held out the book. “You read to me?”

“We’ll read it together.”

“Okay.” Yet he showed no inclination to start. Lizzie settled herself on the horsehair couch and opened the book invitingly, but he stayed at the window. “Very high up,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Ocean far away.”

“Yes, indeed. You’re not worrying about the prophecy, are you? God doesn’t work that way.”

“Story of Noah,” Ti Wong pointed out. “Story of Red Sea.”

“God doesn’t work that way
anymore
,” Lizzie told him, but Ti Wong said she was not being as scientific as Mr. Holmes, and even to her own ears it was unconvincing.

Although San Francisco continued largely uninterested, over in Oakland, Mrs. Woodworth’s crowds were still growing. When her tent was shredded by high winds and collapsed on the worshippers, it was replaced by a new one, specially made to hold an audience of eight thousand,
nine hundred. No evangelist had ever required a space so large before; Mrs. Woodworth asked God’s forgiveness for the hubris of it. Her humility was restored by her unfortunate husband, who opened a concession booth and sold lemonade and peanuts to the believers.