The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (10 page)

The
porter reels up from his guzzle, flushed and shiny-eyed. He’s drawn his own
conclusions from Daniel’s sudden dejection. He proclaims with high spirits,
“Hell with the two bits, mister. Where ye bound? It’s the Fourth of July.
Welcome to San Francisco!”

“Thank
you,” Daniel says humbly.

“Next
time, I’ll charge ye twice.”

The
porter lugs the trunk, Daniel takes the bags, and together they fight the
festive crowd up Market Street. At last Dupont appears to the north. The porter
turns right up a gentle incline that might as well be an Alp, for all Daniel
cares. By God, he’s dry. And exhausted. Thank heaven Father cannot see him in
this ridiculous predicament.

He
and the porter enter another part of town, and the traffic, the sounds and the
smells, the mood and the very light change. A saloon stands on every street
corner, four per intersection, sometimes more if another proprietor has got the
story up. Daniel has never seen so many saloons and resorts crowded together in
such proximity. Music blares from doorways, inviting him in. Men guffaw and
shout. Glasses bang on bars or crash together in toasts. The stink of gunpowder
is infused with the powerful smells of whiskey, tobacco, roasting meat, and an
odd indefinable sickly sweet scent.

A
few women drift in and out of the saloon doors, but mostly linger on street
corners. Daniel approaches a young girl who skips gaily down the pavement in a
sailor’s costume, a navy and white topcoat over bloomers, striped stockings, and
little button boots. A jaunty straw boater is pinned over her yellow curls. She
sidles up to him and curtseys charmingly. He gapes at the heavy white powder
over her grainy jowls, her thin masculine lips beneath the mouth drawn on her
face in red paint. She frowns at his startled look and skips away, tittering.

The
porter laughs nervously. “Here’s as far as I go, mister,” He unceremoniously plunks
the trunk down and strides off.

Daniel
glances around. Something dangles above him, draped over the telegraph wires.
Lace and ribbons, straps and stays. A woman’s undergarment? On the telegraph
wires? His eyes travel from the garment to a window where a lovely young woman
sits. Half-dressed, her hair disheveled, she leans out, seizes a strap of the
corset, and reels in the undergarment like a hooked fish. But she does not
attend too closely to her task. No, her eyes—are they blue?—are trained on him.
He looks over his shoulder, to the right, to the left. She throws back her head
and laughs, her bare throat throbbing.

Heat
rises in his face, under his collar, beneath his belt.

He
drags his trunk a step further. Damn that porter, abandoning him in the middle
of nowhere. He finds himself in front of a huge house with square-cut bay
windows, angular battens, and geometric decorations. The house is painted a
conservative pale gray with bronze green trim, sable brown doors and vestibules.
He should think it a perfectly respectable house except for the young woman at
the window.

Daniel
checks the address. What luck! The porter didn’t abandon him in the middle of
nowhere, after all. He climbs the stairs and pulls the door bell of Number 263
Dupont Street. The bell chimes within. The young woman at the window exclaims
and scampers down from her perch as he stands at the front door of Miss
Malone’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen.

3

Miss
Malone’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen

“Jar
me, I’ll not have my Fourth of July cooked,” says Jessie Malone to the eager
gentleman as he negotiates with her in the downstairs smoking parlor. “And on a
Thursday, which, I’ll have you know, is my most magnetic day.”

“Magnetic
day?” says the gentleman, feigning surprise. Jessie knows very well that his
wife, who also consults with the famed spiritualist Madame De Cassin, surely
possesses a most magnetic day herself. You don’t blow it in on a magnetic day.
Still, if Mrs. Heald was more of a slut and less of a shrew, Mr. Heald might
not be speaking so eagerly with Jessie right now. “What the devil is your ‘magnetic
day’?”

“Sure
and it’s the day when I speak with the sweet spirits.” The bell chimes. “Ah!
There’s someone at the door.”

Mr.
Heald twirls the graying tufts of his tremendous mustache and smirks. How
transparent men are. Plotting how he can convince her otherwise. He would not
dare broach the topic of the increase in the civic contribution he delivers for
her to certain persons in the mayor’s office. Not when he wants to dip his
wick. The biz is the biz, no less and never more when it comes to Mr. Heald.
Sure and Mr. Heald is such a dear friend from the days when she was the toast
of the town and the special gal of the Silver Kings.

“Now,
Jessie. To hell with the spirits and your magnetic days. To hell with whoever
is at the door. To hell with the Fourth of July.”

“Mr.
Heald! I thought you were a patriot.”

“You’ve
had your breakfast and your outing. Now I want to go upstairs like we agreed.
Did we not agree?”

Jessie
smooths the feathers of the pressed hummingbirds decorating her Caroline hat. She
brushes dust from the pink flounces and bows on her bodice. She spies a clot of
horse dung clinging to the hem of her pink topskirt, gives the filthy silk a
good shaking. Mariah will need to clean the carpet. “No, I’m all done in. Good
day, Mr. Heald.”

“Now,
Jessie.” His tone deepens alarmingly, though he’s more or less sober. Mr. Heald
takes her wrist in his hands that have been known to throttle a man. She does
not struggle, but merely lifts her face and raises her eyebrows. He lets go,
but her wrist throbs. He broke it once. When was that? Years ago, so many years
ago, perhaps not long after the time when she was a mermaid at Lily Lake. Was
it really dear Mr. Heald who broke her wrist? Never mind. She’s lost track of
time, of men. “Do not get shy on me.”

“Shy!
Mr. Heald, I cannot abide that ruckus in the park. It has made me weary.”
Cannot abide? She is outraged by the affront she witnessed in Golden Gate Park.

How
she loves her traditional Fourth of July outing! A fitting tribute to the
United States of America, this great and marvelous country that has allowed
her, Miss Jessie Malone, once a penniless orphan, now a woman of nice
sensibilities and simple desires, to amass a modest fortune. Her custom on the
Fourth of July is take breakfast with a roast turkey, champagne, and a
gentleman. Then on to Golden Gate Park for a promenade through Concert Valley.
A breath of air, a shot of sunlight, and the company of fine, upstanding San
Franciscans. How she loves to see the little children skip and run, admire the
ladies in their frocks, nod to gentlemen she scarcely ever sees in the broad
day. She feels patriotic and righteous though her liver aches beneath the stays
of her corset. The Doan’s Pills this morning haven’t helped.

There’s
a goddamn war among the tongs these days, as if a woman of her sensibilities
didn’t know. They’re gangs, of course, organized crime despite the excuses of
the Six Companies, Chinatown’s official liaison. The tongs deal in coolies,
slave girls, opium, weapons, extortion, murder-for-hire. They’ve got codes and
signals. Each tong man wears a special coil in his queue, a particular cap, an
earring, a snippet of embroidery on his jacket. There must be thirty tongs
operating in San Francisco, with rivalries and feuds bloodier than thirty
cockfights. Lately the highbinders have been hacking each other to bits right
beneath the very noses of the bulls running this burg. The stories Jessie has
heard.

But
that’s Chinatown. Not Golden Gate Park on the Fourth of the July. What is the
city coming to?

The
bell chimes again, and Li’l Lucy, a housecoat slung over her corset and
bloomers, flies out of the bedroom on the second floor and hurtles down the
stairs.

“Li’l
Lucy,” Jessie calls sternly as she passes by the parlor.

“Yes,
Miss Malone.” Li’l Lucy skids to a halt. She’s a pastry of a girl, all buttery
and plump, which is the rage in Jessie’s biz. Li’l Lucy is under contract at
Jessie’s Sutter Street resort, the Parisian Mansion. She had gotten in the
family way for the second time and spent the past week recuperating after her
medical treatment. She does not look proper with her housecoat flapping open.
Not here, at the boardinghouse, which is a respectable establishment.

Jessie
frowns. “Why aren’t you dressed, Li’l Lucy?”

“Oh,
Miss Malone, I still ache.”

Hmph.
Jessie seizes the ties of Li’l Lucy’s housecoat and wraps them tightly around
her waist twice, securing the ends in a gay bow. She arranges Li’l Lucy’s
yellow curls across her forehead, smoothing strands down her plump neck. She
wets her forefinger and smooths Li’l Lucy’s eyebrows, vigorously pinches the
girl’s cheeks, the fullness of her lips. The girl’s tender skin blooms with pain
and color.

“There.
You gotta get back in the habit of groomin’, Li’l Lucy. That’s what gentlemen
expect. Now you may answer the door.”

“Yes,
Miss Malone. Thank you, Miss Malone.” Li’l Lucy gazes at her like a starving
she- dog given a thimble of cream.

Jessie
frowns, watching her go. The plumpness is starting to sag. The girl is too
careless. Li’l Lucy is becoming more trouble than she’s worth.

“Now,
Jessie,” Mr. Heald says again, pleading. He takes the liberty of nuzzling the
diamonds dangling from her earlobes. Diamonds that beat anything Mrs. Heald
owns. “You can speak to the spirits later, can you not? Right now, my own sweet
spirit, I thought we could go upstairs. Like we agreed.”

His
mustache tickles, well, she likes mustaches well enough and just about every
fashionable gentleman wears them these days. Upstairs is her private parlor.
She doesn’t have to live at the Parisian Mansion, not anymore. She can afford
door maids to handle the traffic when she’s not there.

“I
have a caller, Mr. Heald. You heard the bell.”

“Jessie,
please. Have pity on me.”

Pity.
Sure and Jessie Malone has pity for no one. Still, she sinks to her knees in
the smoking parlor, grunting when her joints complain. She should not have to
do this anymore, truly she should not. But there’s the boodle for certain
persons in the mayor’s office. Perhaps Mr. Heald, being such a dear friend, may
persuade those persons that her civic contribution is adequate and need not be
increased.

She
tugs at the buttons on his trousers.

Gentlemen,
pah. Like most of his Snob Hill associates, Mr. Heald is a fool and a coward. A
deadbeat when it comes to the behavior she expects of him. Allowing tong men to
carry on in full view of law-abiding citizens.

Tong
men—hatchet men, highbinders, the
boo how doy
—all words for the same
wretched creatures. She knows why they made a fuss in the park, all right. The
ragged Chinese girl is likely to fetch up to two thousand in gold, if she’s
fifteen or sixteen. Well, the biz is the biz. Jessie doesn’t give two hoots
about that. No, the outrage is that hatchet men were troubling a consumptive-looking
lady in a veil and a smart gray dress. A lady, on the Fourth of July!

Jessie
trembles with anger, but she finishes her work. Mr. Heald, thank goodness, is
done quickly. She glances up. He’s got that sagging look he always gets through
the jowls after he’s done. She dabs a handkerchief to her lips, and he helps her
to her feet. Suddenly she’s weary of him, of him and all the gentlemen she has
ever serviced. They’re not even human beings to her anymore. She needs a drink.

“That
will be the usual for the pleasure of my company, Mr. Heald,” she says primly.

Not a
moment too soon. She hears voices murmuring, Li’l Lucy conversing with the
caller, and he answering. A man, of course. Jessie checks her face in one of
the mirrors and peers out the door of the smoking parlor. She glimpses gray
gabardine, a blue vest and necktie, an expensive bowler. He inquires about lodgings
in a charming accent. She spies his hefty trunk and a collection of baggage he’s
vigorously stacking in the foyer. Sure and he’s a vigorous one, she can see it
from here. Young and vigorous, brown curls tumbling down his neck.

“Now,
Jessie,” Mr. Heald says, pulling her back to him. “If truth be told, I thought
this was for friendship, not the usual.”

“If truth
be told, Mr. Heald, it’s always the usual.”

Jessie
whips out her pink lace fan and stirs up a breeze in front of her flushed face.
A drink, a drink, she needs a drink. She runs to the window, leans out, and
yells, “Mariah! Mariah!” The maid is on the roof, keeping a lookout for stray rockets
with a broom and two pails of water. On the Fourth of July in ’93, a rocket
landed on the eaves of Hunter’s Resort on Water Street in Sausalito and damn
near burned down the entire business district. Jessie has no intention of
losing this house, a very fine three-story Stick-Eastlake with extra
gingerbread and a proper paint job that cost her an arm and a leg. “Get down
here, Mariah, we’ve got company. And bring me some champagne.”

“Ah,
now I see,” Mr. Heald says, straightening his vest. “You’re still angry about
those Chinee hoodlums, eh? Now, Jessie. Chinee business is no business of ours.
Why, you ought to know that. You are the Queen of the Underworld. Why should a
little discombobulation like that put you off your feed?”