The Last Woman Standing (10 page)

The my-regiment-leaves-at-dawn theatricality of the kiss bothered me—was Johnny showing off to Wyatt while dangling us both?—but I always warmed to Johnny’s kisses back then, and I was willing to meet him halfway and ignore my gut if this alliance would move us closer to our house and a wedding date. So I kissed Johnny back for all it was worth, giving as good as I got.

Wyatt turned before exiting. “When I come on board, we’ll need a bigger office.”

With Wyatt gone, Johnny pulled away and put the desk between us. I straightened my bodice and sorted my bonnet, then stepped outside to find Wyatt lingering in the doorway of the adjacent cigar shop with his hands in his pockets, exchanging stories with Dave Cohn, the tobacconist.

When I’d shut Johnny’s office door, Wyatt turned to me. “I thought you could use an escort through town.”

“Thank you, Wyatt.” I wiped the remaining liquor from my lips with my handkerchief. I felt pleased for the company after all those long days cooped up with Kitty. I wanted mischief, but I didn’t want to court catcalls from the Allen Street loafers while I walked to the schoolyard flushed from recent kisses.

“Do you know Mr. Cohn?” Wyatt gestured at the tobacconist, busy with his inventory atop a ladder.

“We have a nodding acquaintance.”

“Dave, I want to introduce you to Miss Josephine Marcus.”

Mr. Cohn bobbled the cigar boxes he was inventorying as he scrambled down from his ladder. He squeezed out from around the counter in his overstuffed shop, clearly flustered. With a constellation of moles on his flushed cheeks and a sparse blond beard, he was a few years older than I was but obviously more industrious. He wore a yarmulke at a rakish angle that matched his jagged but jaunty smile. “Finally, an introduction,” he said with a thick German accent. “A pleasure! I’ve heard so much about you.”

“All good, I hope.”

“Not bad!” Dave needled back, revealing a mouth as crowded with crooked teeth as cigars filled his shop. “I’m always happy to meet another member of the tribe.”

“What tribe would that be, Mr. Cohn?”

“It’s not the Apaches, Miss Marcus!”

“Cheyenne?” I felt as if I was suddenly the straight woman in a comedy routine. What next? An illusionist sawing me in two?

“The
mishpocheh
. There aren’t many of us Jews here, but we’ve got a minion of ten men. The Jacobs brothers own the Pima County Bank with Frenchy Lazard. There’s Judge Wallace. And Abraham Hyman Emanuel is a super over at the mill. The Calishers run the dry goods store just across Allen, and if you want a French hat, tell Mrs. Gotthelf that Dave sent you.”

“That’s very generous, but I don’t have anyplace to wear a
chapeau
.”

“We’ll have to change that. Mark your calendar, Miss Marcus. Rosh Hashanah begins on September 23, and I promise you a service you won’t forget.”

“Thank you for the generous invite. I’m not planning that far in advance. I’ll rejoice if I make it to June. In the meantime, it was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Cohn.”

“Call me Dave.” He grinned with that mouth full of yellowed teeth, eager to please. I smiled back with more reserve. He wasn’t my type, and I was already taken, besides. “I’d give you a cigar, but you don’t look like a smoker. Take a Swiss chocolate, my treat.”

Dave dropped a square, wrapped chocolate in my gloved hand. A maid in a red dirndl winked at me from the paper wrapper. I marveled at how far that tiny European had traveled without breaking. What stories could she tell? I wondered. Wyatt extended his left arm, through which I laced my right glove. I justified my familiarity by telling myself it was good to get better acquainted with Johnny’s future associate. It’s amazing how much a girl can lie to herself, but there it was, me feeling every movement of his ropey muscle. Wyatt was truly a gentleman—even if he wore Colt six-shooters with the casual pride with which other men (like bankers and businessmen) wore pocket watches or lodge stickpins.

“Wind’s up,” he said. A twelve-mule wagon thundered past. We crossed Allen Street, me trying to keep pace with his long strides as we dodged men on horseback, their noses and mouths hidden by bandanas to strain the soot.

Anchored to Wyatt’s arm, the wind didn’t irritate me. Feeling secure, I raised my chin and studied the scene around me; I didn’t worry what strangers saw when they looked at me. My adventurous side, tucked away in Kitty’s cottage like socks in a drawer, unfolded. I lacked the urge to lean in to Wyatt as I did with Johnny, to curry favor and flutter eyelashes, to be cute or clever. The unprecedented sense of freedom—from myself, most of all—made me feel giddy and bold.

“Good people,” Wyatt said as we climbed the boardwalk across Allen Street.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Dave Cohn. Good people. He’s a bachelor, you know.”

“Is he?” I was beginning to see where this topic was headed.

“He’d like to marry.”

“I suppose there aren’t many eligible women in a mining camp.”

“Short supply, big demand.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Your mind is elsewhere.” Wyatt guided me to avoid flying tobacco spit. “Dave’s predicament is that he’s seeking someone who shares his faith.”

I stopped and squinted up at him. “Mr. Earp, are you matchmaking?”

“Not at all, Miss Josephine, I’m just stating fact. Good folks.”

Not wanting to seem conceited, I neglected to explain that if I’d wanted to marry a nice Jewish shopkeeper, I had my share waiting in line back in San Francisco. And there were handsomer, richer men in my sister’s congregation attracted to my looks, if not my station in life. I knew too well my value as a beauty without a dowry. Mama had made it very clear that my impulsive actions had cost her a rise in social standing and living standards. Bless Mama for lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday night, but keeping house was no more my destiny than it should have been hers. She should have been a Torah scholar, with an entire
shtetl
tending her needs while she dove into the Talmud, but that was hardly possible back in Europe, much less America.

Wyatt smiled down at me, perhaps recognizing that I wasn’t budging on this topic, and changed the subject. “Are you going to eat that chocolate?” he asked.

“I don’t want to muss my gloves, but I’m happy to share.” I handed it over and Wyatt stripped the wrapper and cracked the morsel in two. I clasped my hands behind my back, closed my eyes, and opened my mouth, receiving the luscious treat. When I opened my eyes, Wyatt was smiling down at me, amused. He quickly looked away. He tossed his half in the air and attempted to catch it in his mouth. It bounced off his broad mustache and tumbled to the dirt.

“Well, that was a waste of a perfectly good chocolate,” I said.

“It was worth a try. I wagered my aim was better than that.”

We strolled on toward the schoolyard. I kept my mouth shut to preserve the luxurious aftertaste of Swiss chocolate from the Arizona grit. Wyatt seemed content to pick our route while I blindly followed his lead, watching the town unfold before me.

“Do you have any sisters for Dave Cohn?” he asked.

“Oh, I have sisters all right. A pair: Rebecca has a husband, and Henrietta is too young to marry. But if I lured Hennie to Arizona, it would break my mother’s heart. It was enough of a
shonda
and sorrow that I ran away unchaperoned.”

“Did you leave home because you were unhappy?”

“Not desperately, but I wasn’t the dutiful daughter Mama demanded. My folks are good people—and I still moved away.” I would have left a placeholder back on Perry Street to marry whatever man she considered suitable if possible. But I yearned for a connection that always seemed out of reach, across the wrought iron fence and down the block. “I hate all the heartache I’ve caused. But, the first time adventure came calling, I answered. I don’t suppose you want to hear how a nice Jewish girl who couldn’t carry a tune got it into her head to join Pauline Markham’s Pinafore on Wheels and hit the road?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Didn’t you ever run away from home, Wyatt?”

“Home had a habit of running away from me, Josephine.” His mood darkened as he chewed his mustache. “But tell me about you.”

“Some people might think that’s my favorite subject, but they’d be wrong.” I took a deep breath. It would have been easy to blame the whole
mishegoss
on my best friend, Dora Hirsch, the daughter of my music teacher. Or I could curse
H.M.S.
Pinafore
. My sister Rebecca and I saw it three times. I identified with the heroine, “the lass that loved a sailor” and shared my name, Josephine. You couldn’t turn a corner in San Francisco in 1879 without seeing a kid in a sailor suit or hearing a bank clerk whistling “Sir Joseph Porter’s Song.”

One afternoon, Dora told me the famed Broadway actress Pauline Markham’s Pinafore on Wheels was casting for the road company bound for San Bernardino, Prescott, and Tombstone. I immediately caught Dora’s hysteria, although I knew very well I couldn’t carry a tune. Dora, a talented singer, explained that running away was our only option, since our mothers wouldn’t approve. As in most things Dora, I immediately agreed.

We left on October 19, 1879. I prepared for my day at school, my hands dappled red with nerves. I could hardly button my dress. When I went to stand for inspection in front of Mama, instead of pecking her on the cheek, I threw myself around her with a great big hug and a kiss. She peeled me off and felt my forehead with the back of her hand, but a fever didn’t explain my strange burst of affection. She sent me outside with a cluck and a shake of the head, missing the tears that were beginning to form.

I embarked on my first great adventure armed with a pile of schoolbooks tied with a leather strap. I didn’t pack a toothbrush or a change of underwear. I didn’t even have a stamp to send a letter back home if disaster struck.

Crossing Perry Street, I approached Dora’s apartment, pining to return home and confess. But I persevered, more terrified of Mama than what might happen to a pair of penniless flirts on the road. Dora answered her front door before I knocked, slipping out with a satchel tucked under her raincoat. She grabbed my hand, and we ran down the slippery wooden steps toward the docks in a rush to start our glamorous new lives.

At the time, I was ignorant of the tour’s impetus: the recent Chicago arrest of Miss Markham’s husband for embezzlement had stranded her on the West Coast. Compelled by financial necessity, Pauline launched her own company: she needed to raise money if she was ever to see Broadway again before her face fell and she aged out of prime roles. The scandal, and the weeping it inspired, had added a second little pouch beneath her right eye that collected powder like alms for the poor.

The company embarked on the SS
Drake
, a drab steamer lacking the romance of the titular schooner, the HMS
Pinafore
. Dora and I spent the journey practicing, since our first performance was scheduled for Los Angeles.

My debut as the cabin boy, not quite the heroine with whom I identified, failed disastrously. Some performers get butterflies in their stomachs—I got buffaloes. I felt hideous in my sailor-suit costume, my hair tucked tightly under a cap, my chest wrapped to camouflage my curves. Once the curtain parted, I managed to strut onstage with my fellow sailors, rolling my hips from side to side as rehearsed. And then I turned and registered the audience. All those strangers peering at me. I froze. While my fellows sang, “We’re sober men and true and attentive to our duty,” it was obvious I was no man, sober or true. I could not control my face: one minute it was ecstatic; the next, I struggled to subdue tears of fear and shame. Being onstage had appeared easier from the audience.

Later, when the time arrived for me to perform my solo—the sailor’s hornpipe—my feet felt nailed to the boards. The sailor chorus repeated my cue—once, twice, three times. When the audience became restless, Dora crept up behind me and pinched my behind so hard that I stumbled forward, clutching my rear end. The audience howled. The actor playing Dick Deadeye grabbed me roughly on one side. The one playing Ralph Rackstraw lifted the other. I danced between them, my feet treading the air as the men performed the familiar steps on either side of me. It was an inauspicious beginning for my brilliant stage career.

During the next performance in San Bernardino, I faced my failure. Sweating in my costume, hands shaking, terrified of my cue, I realized I was no Sarah Bernhardt. While I was deeply disappointed in myself, I recognized that the offstage adventure thrilled me. Bouts of homesickness appeared like waves of nausea, but returning to the normalcy of Perry Street didn’t appeal to me.

I stuck it out all the way to Arizona and even survived a terrifying brush with renegade Apaches. But this is where I fudged the story with Wyatt. Discussing the braves led directly to meeting Johnny. I skipped that part: after all,
I
was telling Wyatt the story, not the
Nugget
.

CHAPTER 12

MARCH 1881

In mid-March, Johnny and I shacked up together in the house my father funded on Sixth Street and Safford, a fishwife’s yell from the Joneses. Albert curled up in the loft, which seemed sturdy enough to hold him. He didn’t eat much. Though we’d yet to stand together before a judge, I began to use the name Josephine Behan when I visited the post office. I told myself I was now a daring Tombstone resident when I was actually a typical greenhorn: gullible and giving it away for free. Madame Mustache could have told me that—and essentially had—but I might as well have jammed my fingers in my ears and sung
“lalalala”
for all the attention I paid to advice that didn’t suit me. I was adventurous enough to get into trouble, but not enough to exploit my situation. Every time I got fed up with Johnny and threatened to leave, he called my bluff and reeled me back with charm and yellow roses.

It took more than smiles and flowers to believe that what we hastily built on Tombstone’s northern fringe was truly a home. The February winds had limited construction, and spring arrived with its itch, so we didn’t wait until it was finished. It was going to be as grand as Kitty’s—or at least have more than a roof and a few walls. I envisioned a white-painted home with gingerbread trim on the gables, a three-piece Eastlake parlor suite, and vases filled with flowers from the garden.

I never got it.

The only finished room, top to bottom, with walls and a window and a door with a brass knob, was the bedroom. A big brass bed dominated the plank floor. A side chair, a chest, a hat stand, and a rag rug showed a woman’s touch—but not mine. Lacking curtains, the room had an unobstructed view of the Dragoons and Cochise’s Stronghold, where the woods rose up to meet the mountain’s granite domes and steep cliffs. Everything else was slapdash, with a hammer here and a saw there. Oilskin stretched over the window frames in place of glass.

I gave myself credit for keeping my knickers up for five long months, though I didn’t exactly begin as Joan of Arc. Ever since Johnny had guided me upstairs at the Grand Hotel that first night, I’d been fighting a losing battle. While I’d held firm that night, keeping my thighs together and corset tight and turning us around when we met the seductive soiled dove Miss Timberline, I was flirting with surrender. Desire unleashed my operatic streak; I was running toward passion, playing with fire, poking the sleeping lion. I wanted to run free—damn the costs—which seemed to be the prevailing attitude in Tombstone.

From the very start—farther back than the night Johnny taught me how to kiss behind the barn—I wanted to yield my girlhood and become a woman. I was tired of playing with dolls, and I had no desire to be a porcelain princess on a shelf myself. But I resisted, heeding the voices of Mama and Rebecca and that spinster scold, Common Sense, who restrained my inner compass.

Johnny pursued and pursued and pursued, and every fiber in me wanted to relent. I didn’t want to surrender but to join him as an equal, to uncover what lay beyond the kiss and the caress. I despised ignorance and craved knowledge of what happened when all the clothes came off in a private room with the rest of the world locked out. Every day, as the frame rose for our house, as the hammers banged and the saws sang, that eventuality neared. And every day I felt more inflamed, more impatient, more agitated. In a town where marriage was optional and men lived like bachelors, their wives in distant cities, the old ideas of love and marriage seemed more flexible.

In the new order, love was the commitment, not the law—or at least that was the line Johnny was selling. To share a roof was to be man and wife, he insisted.
Take my name. You have my heart.
While I wouldn’t have believed Johnny in my damp, dark chamber on Perry Street with Mama down the hall, I wanted urgently, with every passing day, to embrace our union in windswept, starlit Arizona, where I was unfettered and adrift.

I awoke on the morning of March 15 to a surprise snowfall—and Harry Jones thudding by in his long johns while scratching his bait and tackle. I received Kitty’s shrill rebuke to get my lazybones out of bed. I’d had enough. They had, too. I figured they wanted to be left alone so they could fight it out in peace: he was never good enough, and nothing ever satisfied her.

But the Joneses’ marital discord disappeared from my thoughts when I stepped on the porch. The dizzy snow fell softly, chaotically, stirring me. I felt energized, embracing the morning, wanting to unwrap myself beneath the flakes and inhale the cool vanilla deliciousness. The air seemed alive with promise. It rarely snowed in San Francisco. This was new and magical, as if the real world only existed in places of extreme weather—cold and heat, thunder and wind, flash flood and drought. I descended in bare feet and raised my face to the sky. The powder dropped on my cheeks and eyelashes. The fresh white slapped a coat of paint on the house, giving it a fairy-tale glow. A northern cardinal—a flash of vibrant persimmon, a male—paused on the roof, then teased me with its flight, disappearing into the dancing whiteness.

Johnny had promised to come by for me that evening and show me how the house was progressing. He planned to take the night off, explaining, “The bedroom is finished.” Those words filled me with anxiety and anticipation: what would it be like to share a room, not with a sister, but a man? What could that intimacy be like, and would I at last experience the bliss I expected sex to be? I fretted like a silly hen that I wouldn’t live up to all the expectation in Johnny’s eyes. That led me to wallow in my inexperience while I did the baking and scrubbed the linens, which prompted deeper worries about where that disappointment might lead. Would it change the way he saw me? Would I rise or fall in his esteem?

The day seemed interminable as I flipped and flopped between hope and fear. At dusk Johnny arrived, flashing his easy smile and familiarity; I was both relieved and uneasy. He hurried me down the street past the empty lots of houses to come, and the rubble of camps disbanded, his muscled arm wrapped securely around my waist.

At the threshold of our cottage, Johnny gathered me up and carried me into the house. Our bodies together made the statement. I knew we couldn’t wait any longer. Or maybe I didn’t know, because it isn’t a thing of the mind, but accepted, unfolded, relaxed, surrendered, finally, to the natural flow of man and woman possessed. Between kisses and calling me his bride, he said something like, “Who needs floors when we have love?” or “Who needs a stove when we’ll be cooking in the bedroom?” Aloft in his arms, I was so infatuated that I failed to notice that the snow had begun to waft inside through cracks in the walls and roof, puddling on the unfinished floors.

Johnny walked the plank bridge between the entrance and the bedroom, crossing the parlor, which had been roughed out but not yet filled in. He kicked open the chamber door and tossed me on the bed. Taking a match from his vest pocket, he lit candles, risking all we’d built. Moonlight entered the window, turning the snow crystals at the corners into small chandeliers to rival those at the Grand Hotel.

Johnny removed his hat, jacket, and vest. He turned to me and said, unknowingly echoing Kitty, “Get up, lazybones.” I laughed and obeyed. I felt a tingling in my fingers—and between my legs—that life was about to change between us in a way that had nothing to do with legal papers. If we were going to cross a border together, I was ready. I rose beside the bed and awkwardly began to unbutton the back of my blouse.

“You never have to do that by yourself again,” Johnny said, loosening the fastenings, kissing me slowly, then adding the tip of his tongue. My knees loosened. He pushed the blouse off my shoulders. The room was so cold I could see my breath mixing with his; I didn’t feel a chill, but a slow flush.

With a quick hand, Johnny unhooked my skirt, which pooled at my feet. That left that garment that had always been between us: my corset, my bodyguard. He untied the top with gentle hands. I wondered how he could advance so unbearably slow. I attempted to help, but he pushed away my hands. He held my gaze until he bent down to loosen the remainder with his teeth. I held his head while running my fingers through his hair, rubbing the tips of his ears. He’d taught me so many little pleasures—but now the feast.

My corset dropped. Johnny inched down my chemise, exposing my breasts to the moonlight. I had never been naked in front of a man. Doubt overwhelmed me. I feared I would disappoint him. He might laugh and turn away in rejection and loathing. I struggled against the instinct to cover myself. And then I watched the reaction in his candlelit eyes, which awakened with new interest. They flamed with an unfamiliar—but not unwelcome—light, and what seemed to be a deeper appreciation of what I brought to this party.

Not only did I not disappoint, I exceeded expectations. Viewing that fire in Johnny’s eyes unleashed a
chutzpah
in me previously unknown. I felt comfortable in my flesh as I had never before, even when bathing alone. I rubbed my belly as it curved toward my hips. I pushed back my shoulders so that my breasts rose with each new breath. I raised my chin to flatter my cheekbones. I had known stage fright. Now I encountered its opposite: a bold physical freedom that surprised me as much as it delighted Johnny. I wasn’t ashamed. I would
not
be ashamed. In fact, I was unleashed.

I reached up to pull out my hairpins, releasing the curls slowly as Johnny watched. He undressed, as if reluctant to tear his eyes from mine and break the spell. My hair sprang wild and loose around me as I cupped my breasts and approached the edge of the bed where he sat. He clasped my thighs tightly between his, brushed my nipples lightly with his palms, and in a sudden motion, took my right nipple into his mouth, sucking hard, then soft, then hard. My head fell back. He reached around my bottom and settled me onto his lap, my legs split. He caressed and resettled and caressed, until he eased me onto his manhood. A painful, awkward moment passed as he tried to break through my seal. He held my waist while trying to gentle me through the rough passage, but forbidding my retreat. At last the barrier broke. I tumbled as he pushed deeper inside me. We stopped there, and I felt what it was like to have bare skin against bare skin, and my arms around those broad shoulders I loved so well. It was a closeness I’d never before experienced.

“My love,” he said, brushing away my curls so that he could regain eye contact. He rocked me from below, slowly and rhythmically, and I took quickly to the dance. My knees gripped the bed and my hands his shoulders as he guided my hips, rocking me back and forth, faster and harder, slower and gentler, until I broke free from his control and found my own rhythm. He lay flat on the bed, feet on the floor as I rode him out, pressing hard against his pelvis with my own until I felt a cataclysmic release. Afterward, I collapsed on his chest, drenched in sweat. Tears ran down my cheeks onto Johnny’s chest as I curled into him, our bodies illuminated by the hot, yellow candlelight and the cool, blue moonlight.

After I caught my breath, Johnny grabbed my hips, flipping me onto my back. As I lay there, hands outstretched on the pillows in surrender, he entered and stroked, fast and slow, his eyes closed in concentration, until he had nothing left to give. I felt his liquid warmth deep inside as he relaxed above me. The urgent pounding of horse hoofs outside ended our short-lived moment of complete union. Someone hammered the front door; a horseman’s face appeared at the bedroom window. He banged on the glass. I covered myself with a quilt.

“Get your skinny ass out of bed, Behan!” yelled the horseman with a scar from ear to chin. “Bandits held up the Sandy Bob stage bound for Benson. Philpot’s been shot, and a passenger’s down. We got to round up a posse, man, not a pussy.”

Johnny hopped up and hurried into his clothes, skipping into one boot while holding his other and hat as he headed for the door. With one hand on the knob, he spun around, shot me his most charming smile, and said, “I would have liked an encore, sweet pea, but duty calls. Don’t wait up.”