The Harlot’s Pen (6 page)

When I got to the door, dim light seeped through the side casement from the street, and my eyes, starved by darkness, at last could take in my surroundings. I pulled on the door, but of course it was locked. I felt a wave of despair and nausea, steadying myself against the high desk I had seen when I was brought in. I looked over at the high desk, and saw that a ring of keys hung from a hook on the other side, faintly catching the light. A shorter woman would not have been able to see them, but grateful for once for my height, I reached across and took them as quietly as I could.

I had no idea what time it was, but the sky was a flat dark with no sign of dawn as I stepped out onto the deserted street. For reasons I still don’t understand, I locked the door behind me and took the keys. I looked around, and there was no person, not even a derelict in sight. I walked quickly towards Market Street. The lights of the streetlamps, their auras glowing luridly in the misty air, lured me, until I realized that I must look like a disheveled whore, likely to attract either an arrest or another horrible encounter.

At the edge of the main thoroughfare, I moved tentatively under the unavoidable streetlight, then jumped back as two shadows rounded the corner. My heart pounded as they walked by. One turned, seemed to see me. “Come on out, girl,” he said thickly. “Give me a kiss.”

His friend laughed drunkenly and took him by the arm. “Get a pox from that filth,” he said. Unbidden the image of the red-nosed prostitute on the corner in Oakland rose in my mind. This was her nighttime, her daily bread of fear. I skulked along the side of the road, keeping in shadows, and turning up Larkin Street rather than the thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue once I had crossed Market Street.

At first I walked briskly in the direction of home, too devastated to even feel the cold or notice the heaviness of the wet air. But my pace slowed when I realized what home meant: Sam’s home, and no haven for me. Yet I had nowhere else tonight.

Whenever I heard a car or carriage wheels behind me, I moved into the doorway of a house until it passed. I hurried along, walking up the steep blocks, past darkened homes and carriage gates. At last, the first glimmer of dawn in the distant sky was finally visible as I crested Nob Hill. I was breathing hard, both from my rib pain and from the exhaustion of the climb, when an automobile stopped next to me. I had been too tired to even hear its approach.

“Can I help you, miss?” a fine voice from within called to me. I shrank back, but with the growing light I couldn’t hide. The white buildings behind me, now bathed in the slight glow of late winter sunrise, set me off in bold relief, and the dark car loomed almost gigantic in my tired eyes. A man looked out of the car, and I looked stealthily back at him. He seemed kind, and I was no longer able to think clearly. I staggered toward him.

“Please. Could you take me to a friend’s? I have been robbed.” I emerged from the shadows.

The look of horror on his face drove me back. “No, don’t hide, miss. I won’t hurt you. Come, come into my car, and we will take you where you will be safe. Joseph, pull forward for the lady,” he said to his driver.

He held out his hand. I inched forward and took it, and he helped me into his car. Looking more closely, I thought I recognized him. I looked away, for if I might know him, he could know me. But he was a true gentleman, and if he did recognize me, he said nothing. Instead he introduced himself. “I am Fremont Older. Where can we take you?”

Fremont Older! The editor of the
Call
who had so unceremoniously declined my poem and had fatefully pointed me toward the
Argus
. In some way, here was the catalyst of my undoing. But for the moment he was my rescuer.

I stopped before giving my own address. What would Sam do to me? Though it could not be worse than what was done to me tonight, he would only blame me for my troubles and add to them. I paused, and then, remembering her promise, gave Jacqueline’s address.

“Oh, the Pemberton home,” he said, and I hid my face in my hands. I should have realized that he would know them. “They are very kind people, and if they are your friends you will be in good hands.”

I sighed with relief, and we were soon at Jacqueline and Francis’ doorstep. Mr. Older escorted me to the door and waited with me until a maid, still with sleep in her eyes, answered the bell. She eyed me first with suspicion, and then with a glimmer of recognition. I hoped she would not greet me by name.

“Tell Francis that Fremont Older is here with an injured friend. There has been an accident, and she needs help immediately.” Mr. Older took charge before the maid could be indiscreet.

The maid stepped aside and let us in. Mr. Older nodded to her, and as soon as she was out of sight he said, “I’ll leave you now. You will be safe here. And send me the next poem you write. The last one wasn’t half bad.”

And before I could reply, as I stood in shock, he was gone.

Moments later, Jacqueline was wrapping me in a blanket and ordering a hot bath. I woke up in a soft bed with a hot cup of tea at my side and a sourdough roll with sweet butter alongside, and a stack of blank paper, a fountain pen on the desk nearby.

* * * *

March 10, 1920

Jacqueline sent for Sam once she deemed me fully recovered from my ordeal, and he bore me away with a show of care that I knew was a false display for the Pembertons’ consumption. Once home, I awaited the barrage, but instead he ignored me completely. I wisely shut myself not in the bedroom we shared, but in the other bedroom that we used for occasional guests.

We tiptoed tentatively around one another, avoiding any reference to the past several days. How we could not speak of what had happened was a testament to the ultimate destruction of our relationship.

At last, at dinner he made his announcement. Sam had ended the lease on the house as of the first of June, agreeing generously let me stay there until then. I had jeopardized his future with my antics, as he called him, and he was through with me. He was leaving for Argentina on April first, and I could stay in the house until the first of June, after which I could sell the furniture and keep the proceeds as my settlement. Other than that, he was washing his hands of me. In the future, he would dine alone.

I nodded, grateful for his generosity, and grateful that he did no worse than end our relationship formally, as it had ended spiritually long before. Our evening passed dully, with each of us preoccupied with our own thoughts.

On a better note, someone has posted Mrs. Whitney’s bail, outrageously set at $10,000, so she could be free while her case awaited appeal. Rumor had it Francis Pemberton was somehow involved. Bless those two, Jacqueline and Francis.

* * * *

April 1, 1920

On the last night before he left for Argentina, Sam asked me to dine with him. I had been taking a tray to my room for three weeks, so it made for a change, but I was still edgy as I sat down. He ate in silence, and therefore so did I, but when we were finished, he put his glass of port down and looked at me. He cleared his throat a few times, and I waited. Finally he spoke.

“Violetta, I don’t know how to say this. When I met you, you were beautiful to behold, and I was captivated by you. Your energy, your brave journalism, your fervent support of the Progressive movement… You’ve changed into a woman I don’t really recognize, willing to take foolish risks to yourself and to others, and you never think a minute beyond your actions.”

I raised my eyebrows, almost ready to take him to task.
I
had changed?
He
had gone from the compelling, heart-stopping firebrand to a self-serving capitalist, from thrilling companion to a man who moved between icy aloofness and rough fury. But I held my tongue.

“When you worked for Miss Bary, she tried to teach you to plan. You did good work, but once she left you showed yourself to be as flighty as a young girl. The idea that you wrote a radical poem and had it published without asking me, without regard to the consequences, not just to yourself but to me, still stuns me. That you lied and never once mentioned that you were running back and forth to Oakland to attend that communist’s trial, that saddens me.”

That was quite a speech. It was as if he had written in out, memorized it, and delivered it at the table. He had schooled his face into a mask of pity, but the contempt kept slipping out. I started to remonstrate, but he held up his hand. He hadn’t finished his piece. “I know you disagree. But that’s not what I want to tell you. I am leaving tomorrow, and when I return, I don’t want to be associated with you. Many believe we are married and may still believe that we are legally bound unless we divorce. You will announce that we have divorced, and you will accept any scandal that follows. If you hope to ruin me by disclosing our cohabitation, believe me, the price you will pay will be vastly higher. I have told Mr. Dohrmann the truth, and though he disapproves strongly, he thinks only slightly less of me than before. I have reassured him that I will not leave you penniless. With the sale of the furniture you will be funded for a time.

“But lastly, and this is hardest for me to say, I want to tell you I did love you once. I did, Violetta, though I no longer do. I loved you, and for that, I thank you.”

He got up, left the table, and locked himself in the study. In the morning, he and his trunks had left for Argentina.

I called the furniture broker the next day.

* * * *

May 1, 1920

I received a summons to lunch from Fremont Older. I had not dared approach him since his rescue of me in March, but his parting words were never far from my brain. At last, and with great trepidation, I had written to him the previous week with a proposal, and to my relief he invited me to call on him.

I entered the fine restaurant near the
Call’s
new offices and spotted him sitting alone at a corner table, a whiskey already in hand. He rose slightly to meet me as the maitre d’hôtel pulled out my chair. “Whiskey?” he asked me. I shook his head, although I would have likely benefitted from a drink.

“Let us go straight to business, so that you may have an appetite for your lunch,” he said. “Two soles,
meunière
,” he added to the waiter, who nodded and left, as if I had been invisible.

“Now, my dear, I have taken on far less promising projects in my day. I have hired female editors, I have taken convicted murderers and housed them in my own home to rehabilitate them. Backing a project destined to fail is not foreign to me.”

I blushed. Destined to fail was not how I saw my proposal.

“Your proposal is nonsense. You know something about workers’ rights, I do know who your father was, and you may know a bit about the minimum wage,” he added.

I opened my mouth to remonstrate with him. I knew more than
a bit.

“But we don’t need another article on the misery of the working woman, or the unfairness of the low wages. What we need is something that will rock the boat, knock the complacency out of the newly enfranchised women. Women in California have had the vote since 1911 and have done nothing to better their condition. Women will likely have the vote by the end of this summer across the nation, and California women will be able to vote in all elections. Now is the time to grab them by their lovely lapels and open their eyes, to mix the metaphor.

“Now, how can you influence these women with no connections of your own? What can you do besides write?”

“Play fifteen-ball pool,” I said facetiously.

Mr. Older actually winked at me. “When you figure out an angle to write about, you have a project.”

I looked down, stymied. I knew no one influential except Mr. Dohrmann, whom I could never again face. I had no “angle.”

An absurd thought came to mind. “Prostitutes are future voters, too. They are the ones who have taken the brunt of the closing of the houses, and they are some of the most pathetic ones thrown to the mercy of society. Perhaps I can write about them, even influence them. If there were living wages, women would not have to sell themselves.”

Fremont Older threw his head back and laughed. I looked back down at the table, mortified. “No, no, don’t be upset! The idea is absurd, but not as bad as your first idea. There’s potential there, and if it’s original, it sells.”

“Sells?”

“Papers, silly girl. That’s what we do, right?”

I nodded, dejected. That’s what the
Argus
had done, and it had cost me everything. I said so to Mr. Older.

“But everything is what counts. If you don’t give everything, you get nothing. But let us discus this. What whores do you know?”

I, of course, knew none. “And now I don’t even know how to find one.” I thought about the girl so long ago on the Oakland street.

“Well then, let me tell you how. There is a madam up in Sonoma who runs a most elegant house, and every influential man in California who is not impotent or a Mormon has frequented her establishment. She closed up her San Francisco shop when the getting was good and opened up in a place called El Verano. It is an extremely high class joint, the women are beautiful—and most prostitutes are not even pretty, legend to the contrary. The madam is gracious, intelligent, and well informed. She has a fine cook, an excellent liquor storehouse, and the best musical entertainment to be had. You could go to her, write about her girls…”

He stopped, this time it was he who stared into the distance. Then he banged his spoon on the table. “In fact, become one of her girls!”

I sat back, outraged. “You are joking.”

“No, I am not. I can see it now: the true story of a working girl, as told to
The Call
! You are quite pretty, though a bit on the tall side, and well spoken. You have had, shall we say, adventures, so you will not be shocked at the tasks to which you are appointed. You will gain access to the most influential men in California. And think about the goldmine of material you will have for your writing! If you write about your experiences, changing the names, obviously, so you don’t get us sued for libel, I will consider publishing it. Your story will reach the hearts and minds of the people who matter most.