The Last Woman Standing (2 page)

The Grand Hotel was just a month old then. It’s not so grand now. Just like him. Dead like the rest of them. I’m impatient with the tourists with their little paper maps and their thirst for an afternoon’s adventure only a bus ride away from ordinary life. Everybody who entered Tombstone then was taking a risk, I think, sifting through the memories of a time when Turkish carpets lined the Oriental Saloon across the street, and liquor-fueled cowboys stomped through the doors in muddy boots emblazoned with playing cards and stars, wearing gaudy, scarlet bib-front shirts. They had that bandy-legged walk that didn’t just come from riding horses but showed how heavy their manhood was. Those folks on the bus wouldn’t expect me to think like that, but I knew every step those men took was a dare: my balls are bigger than yours, my pistol shoots straighter, my horse faster, and my loving stronger. I’m old but I’m not dead yet.

I can almost hear the whole cacophony of Tombstone during that boom time. The mines and the mill ran night and day, with the whistle blowing the shift changes, and rock clacking on rock. Loaded wagons pulled by eight-horse teams pounded the streets, and the miners traveled in a herd heading to work on the hill with lunch buckets and scrubbed faces, passing the previous shift returning with rounded shoulders and cheeks powdered gray. I can see my old friend Kitty with a basket on her arm in a sweet feathered hat, flouncing to market and courting wolf whistles, and Nelly Cashman standing outside her restaurant in her big, bloody apron, having a smoke. And I can see Johnny’s nine-year-old son, Albert, walking his beloved pony, Geronimo, back to Dexter Livery Stable, which Johnny co-owned with John Dunbar. They shared Mrs. Dunbar, too, as it turned out, much to Dunbar’s chagrin and my own disgust.

And there’s Wyatt, standing on the corner, armed with his integrity, his boots hip-width apart, his thumb anchored in his dark vest, licking a corner of his mustache. He was patient. He could outwait a turtle. He looks up at me from the past with those steady sky-blue eyes of his. He always saw me clearer than I saw myself.

That was the main difference between Wyatt and Johnny, although there were many. Wyatt saw me for who I was beneath the creamy complexion and the big brown eyes. He knew I had a heart as big as my chest. He had the ability to read men and women, and from the very first he knew I could be his partner in adventure and his haven in a hotel room. That’s a big thing for a pretty woman—to know she’s loved for who she actually is behind the veil of beauty, her flaws and foibles and cussedness. Johnny loved me like a china doll, like a possession. And once he got me in the sack, that was it. I could bake his biscuits and watch his son and wash his socks tucked away in some tiny house on a side street. He liked the chase. Too bad for him: the best was yet to come. There were days when Wyatt and I stayed together right across the street at the Cosmopolitan and didn’t leave our big carved-wood Renaissance Revival bed until dusk fell and he had to strap on his guns and return to work. Those days could be bottled and sold as jam. We made love in that room right there across the street, and no one knows what happened there but us—and he isn’t talking. He was never one to kiss and tell.

Snatches of Fred Astaire singing “The Way You Look Tonight” float out of the café when the wind breaks, and they make me miss dancing with my man. I wasn’t much of a professional dancer (despite my short-lived career in Pauline Markham’s Pinafore on Wheels), but I loved to dance, and so did Wyatt. He would have liked that song. He was so good-looking, tall and solid, sober but with eyes that smiled at me. We could spend months with just each other as company, talking or not talking; it didn’t matter. Neither of us was easy to live with: he had his sorrows and his moods, and I could climb up on my high horse faster than Annie Oakley. We had our booms and our busts over nearly fifty years together, and I never could have the children we wanted. But that was later, so much later, in California and Alaska. This was just Tombstone, when he was young and I was younger. This was the town where I lost my virginity and found my sex.

CHAPTER 2

OCTOBER 1880

I left San Francisco for the second time on a Friday night at dusk. The foghorns bayed in the distance, but the white mist hadn’t yet swallowed our humble stoop. My mother’s disapproval shrouded the dining room as densely as the coming fog, and my father’s shoulders rounded in defeat. He’d turned inward at the dinner table, hardly raising his eyes from his soup. What joy Papa might have shared with a different wife, someone with simpler tastes who cherished him as he deserved to be cherished—but that would have been the end of me. I am cut from their two cloths stitched together, both fun-loving and determined to make my way up in the world. But my departure at nineteen was the definition of a
shonda
: a shameful act witnessed by a gentile.

That Christian witness was Mrs. Catherine Jones, lately of Tombstone, dispatched by my fiancé, Johnny Behan, to gather me for the first leg of our journey to the Arizona Territories. Despite Mrs. Jones’s daily assurances from her Nob Hill hotel over the past three days that she would collect me, she had not yet appeared on our doorstep. My mother found this suspicious. (That she was leery was not unexpected: skepticism was a deeply ingrained part of her nature, along with a string of superstitions that she carried over from Prussia.) That night she still must have hoped that Mrs. Jones would never arrive, as if she were a figment of my imagination and I had written the letters with their extravagant curlicues on fine hotel stationery myself. I was mischievous, but not that crafty.

Although my mother’s anxiety was contagious, I remained optimistic: my packed carpetbag sat atop my trunk in the dark foyer under the coat hooks. The mood around the battered table laden with common porcelain and bent utensils didn’t stop my feet from tapping an anticipatory jig underneath. I kept my hands imprisoned between my thighs so my mother wouldn’t notice their restless wandering. I wanted out, out, out, yet I was concerned about leaving my father, sister, and brother behind in this house of impossibly high standards, the land of never-good-enough.

The five of us—my father, Henry (“Heschie” to his friends); my sister, Henrietta (“Hennie” or my “Hen”), three years my junior; and Nathan, my mother’s favorite and now a man of twenty-two—were having what seemed like our last Shabbat dinner together. The air was thick with Ma’s unspoken criticism. Every prayer, even the
HaMotzi
over the bread Papa had made with his own hands, felt like a curse.

Ma wore the dark-brown taffeta she usually reserved for funerals and fasts, stiff at the elbows and tight at the waist, but I was so distracted by my leave-taking that I didn’t consider her wardrobe choice. Counting back, she must have been fifty-two: tall and thin and dignified, her baleful, pale face with the pointy chin surprisingly unwrinkled, and long, aristocratic fingers with almond-shaped nail beds, reddened from plucking chickens and scrubbing laundry. A ghostly white swath emerged from her widow’s peak, a rebuke to the luxuriant dark hair that she’d twisted and plaited and piled into a bun at the crown of her head. She was imposing rather than attractive, with blue eyes that only Hennie had inherited. Nathan and I returned her gaze with our father’s brown eyes.

My half sister Rebecca (four years older than Nathan) had purchased this somber luxury my mother wore with money hoarded from her housekeeping budget. Rebecca had a different father—my mother’s first husband—and looked out from the face of a stranger. He had gifted her with generous ginger hair that she caught up like crimped red ribbon atop her head. Rebecca’s husband, Aaron Weiner, leased the dark three-story townhouse on Perry Street; the couple lived in relative privacy on the third floor while my mother cooked and cleaned for us all.

I loved Rebecca. She was my second, more indulgent mother, who introduced me to Gilbert and Sullivan’s
H.M.S.
Pinafore
and its heroine, Josephine, “the lass that loved a sailor” not of her father’s choosing. It was an irony not lost on Ma. She was as sharp as she was judgmental and certainly parceled out guilt to Rebecca for indulging my “artistic” side when she was supposed to be shopping a more cultured version of myself to wealthy widowers of the congregation and members of the Weiners’ German Jewish circle. I harbored no anger toward Ma. Well, maybe a little. I hadn’t the guts to ask how this marrying a daughter off to an older man differed from the prostitution practiced on Tombstone’s Allen Street, except that the transaction remained within the faith.

We were all related on Perry Street, but it wasn’t quite like living with family. We were the poor relations, the
schnorrers
, and on a Friday night, Becca and her husband ate with his grandparents and extended family in a grander house on the hill. At the end of the night, they changed shoes to trudge home so as not to break the Sabbath. We were unwelcome at their Shabbat dinner, prepared by a cook and served by a maid. The Weiners expected their son the businessman to earn his way up to a house on the street beside theirs. Everyone must pull their weight. He’d taken a step back because he’d married Becca (even though he got lucky with my beautiful sister, considering his extreme myopia, lack of shoulders, and misshapen spine).

The formal mantel mirror above the dinner table reflected the five of us as if in a painting. To my left sat Papa; Ma was on my right. Across the table perched Nathan and Hennie. Nathan resembled my mother: tall, towering over Papa, with a pointed chin and the serious brow of a scholar crawling across his forehead like a caterpillar. Hennie was a shy girl on the plain side of pretty, with a long, freckled face and heavy eyelids above pale lashes, which gave her a sleepy look that led people to underestimate her ample intelligence. Before I left home the first time, I had sat beside Hennie facing the mirror. Now I sat quarantined by myself. We clustered in the wood-paneled front room with the bay windows overlooking an identical house across Perry Street. I watched Ma with her generous brow and incongruous pointy chin light the Shabbat candles at the foot of the table. Like a hankie dropped by God, her ecru lace scarf covered her taut bun. She was the picture of martyrdom, raising her arms in their stiff leg-of-mutton sleeves. She passed slender fingers in three graceful circles over the candles, set in heavy silver—all that remained of the treasures her family had smuggled out of Prussia. I loved my mother but wouldn’t follow her down her path of righteousness and sorrow. We lived in a new world. She dwelled among old
dybbuks
.

Then Papa took his turn at the table’s head. Though he was eight years younger than Ma, his hair had dwindled to a few wisps, and he shrunk into silence around her. He was a gentle man whose brush of a mustache made me imagine what a dashing bachelor he must have been when he first met my mother on Manhattan’s Hester Street. They were Prussian immigrants from trampled towns near each other—Ma, a recent widow with three-year-old Rebecca, and he, already a baker capable of earning a living even in tough times. Papa didn’t feel the Sabbath ritual deeply like Ma, but he knew the drill, having grown up as the only son among sisters. In the rapid, mumbling Hebrew Papa used, he blessed us children (I heard Ma’s breath catch when he blessed me; I knew where I got my flair for drama). Then he muttered the
HaMotzi
over the braided challah that he made at the bakery where he worked.

Ma sniffed, and we all sat down to kreplach soup with chunky carrots floating in broth left over from last week’s roast. I had already served the soup. Hennie’s job was clearing the table. Nathan’s was studying the Torah with Ma after dinner. I lost myself in my bowl, then looked up to catch Hennie’s eyes. She looked down and away shyly. This was strange. We’d always been close, even if that meant I led her into temptation—getting her ears pierced when we knew Ma wouldn’t approve, buying trinkets in Chinatown, and peeking into a basement room where men lay out on cots and women gazed at us with lazy kohl-rimmed eyes, the air smelling sickeningly sweet.

Hennie and I shared a bedroom until that year. When I returned from Arizona the first time (after I ran away with Pauline Markham’s Pinafore troupe and met Johnny), Ma changed the sleeping arrangements, as if my itchy feet might be contagious. She took Hennie into her bed on the second floor, dispatched Pa to sleep with Nathan in the bigger bedroom I’d shared with Hennie, and moved me to a slit of a room at the rear. No one was happy with the arrangement, particularly Papa, but it meant we all joined Ma in her misery.

Though I ultimately learned to love the silence of the Arizona (and later, Alaska) nights sharing a campfire with Wyatt, listening for the swoop of a hawk on its prey or an owl’s otherworldly hoot, I never knew when to keep quiet around my own dinner table. While the rest of my family silently slurped soup, I had to interrupt the awkward peace. I began to prattle about my upcoming journey to Arizona. Mrs. Jones and I would be riding in safety on the new train to the territories. This was met with silence. Apparently, if I was going to leave, at least I should have had the decency not to discuss it. But if there was an elephant in the room, I made it stand on its hind legs and dance in the center ring. I pressed on, like the frontierswoman I believed I was: “And there won’t be any encounters with Apaches this time. Even though we’ll be making the final leg of the journey by stagecoach, it’s as safe as taking the Market Street cable car. It’s hardly even an adventure.”

“You want an adventure,” threatened Mama, “I’ll give you an adventure.”

“Leave it, Sophie,” Papa said.

“Look where leaving it got us, Henry.” Ma’s voice rose to a level that would have worked from the
bimah
to the last row of the congregation. She could have been a rabbi, if such a thing as a female rabbi wasn’t ridiculous even in her own eyes. “Do you think you are the only person to have left home, Josephine? Does that make you special?” She stared at me with those judgmental eyes of God.

“You don’t want me to go, Mama, but you don’t want me here, either.”

“I left home once. My father sent us ahead to America, my mother and my sisters, Esther and Maida.” Mama paused. I had not even known she had two sisters. After not mentioning them for so long, she looked as though just the words were painful.
Esther. Maida
. This previously hidden side of my reserved mother frightened me.

Mama pushed aside her soup. “We traveled from our village to Hamburg, and then sailed to Liverpool, and from there to New York City. The trip across the Atlantic took eleven weeks. As soon as the ship set sail, my mother began retching over the side. Maybe it was for lack of food, or seasickness, or maybe my father got her pregnant again, a going-away present. Who knows? I never saw the man again to ask. Between spells of nausea, Mama cut some treasure out of her hem—my dowry, or Maida’s—then traded it to a mate for supplies so that she could make us a meal. The gentile returned a day later with a gruel made for cats. My older sister, Maida, prepared a soup from it. Mama ate a bit and then gagged. Esther was only seven. She was such a good girl that she swallowed the first bite without quarrel when Mama told her to. But then she couldn’t force the foul stew back up. We gave her emetics. Nothing worked. She passed that night without a single word.”

Hennie burst into tears. Nathan flushed. Papa, apparently familiar with the tale, shook his head at me and sighed, bracing for the
tsuris
my words had unleashed. I could not believe that Mama would take this moment, when I had one foot out the door and needed a positive, supportive send-off to tide me over in rough times, to reveal her past, as if to blame me for the tragedy of that voyage forty years before.

Ma continued with her eyes latched on mine alone. “Next day, when the officers discovered my sister’s corpse, they immediately went to remove it. My mother wailed. She threw herself on the body and begged for the chance to prepare it for a Jewish burial. But, thank the
goyim
, there was to be no burial; they tossed Esther overboard with the waste.”

Ma looked straight at me as if I, who consorted with gentiles, could explain their behavior. Her face was now red, and she cried as she talked, not even pausing to wipe her nose. I’d never seen her weep, although I’d heard her sobs through the walls. It was titanic, so frightening and fueled by anger (unleashed after years of suppression) that I found it difficult to be empathetic. It made me want to put my arms over my head and hide. She told us that all her family could do to show their sadness was rip their already-torn collars. And Maida, so silent and gray during the proceedings, who blamed herself for the foul stew, slipped away the next day at dawn. “I saw my sister’s eyes flicker and close, and then she was gone,” Mama said. “It was the splash that I remember most distinctly after all these years, and my mother’s chiding when I had refused to eat that gruel not fit for cats. Believe me, there were times, long after the boat docked, when I wished I had.”

Just as Hennie leapt from her chair and rushed headlong to comfort our mother, kneeling at her side, there was an impatient knocking at the door. I pushed my chair back to run to the entrance, but my mother’s stare kept me in my seat. Nathan rose instead, buttoning his vest like the banker she wanted him to be. He did not look my way.