The Last Woman Standing (3 page)

Nathan approached the entry and cautiously opened the door but couldn’t keep Hurricane Kitty from entering with the damp San Francisco air. Mrs. Catherine “Kitty” Jones, currently of Tombstone, was a plump pepper-pot with overplucked eyebrows, bottle-red hair, and a bosom like two jostling grapefruits. She was as exotic in our somber house as a scarlet macaw in her fitted jade-green bodice and voluminous skirt, striped royal blue and antique gold. The exorbitant feather in her tiny cap caught on the door as Kitty brushed by, her arms open and cheeks flushed.

“You must be Josephine,” Kitty said to Hennie, whom my mother had swept up to stand beside her when the stranger entered the dining room. My sister, her arms interlaced around mother’s waist, gaped at her in something like horror. Kitty continued: “I knew Johnny liked them young, but this is excessive.”

Kitty laughed loudly, alone in her mirth, as she turned to me flirtatiously, cocking a shoulder and raising her arched brows. “No, no,
no
,” she said in a high, breathless voice (I would learn that her corset pinched her diaphragm, leading to light-headedness and headaches), “
you
are Josephine. Yes. A true beauty, just as Johnny said, although those brows could be clipped by a gardener.”

My family stiffened. Undeterred, I popped out of my seat, sloshing the soup from my bowl onto the linen tablecloth Ma would have to bleach and soak. My mother flinched as I rushed to embrace the woman whom I’d never met before this day, so happy was I that she’d actually arrived.

Johnny had dispatched Kitty with a generous allowance to collect me and chaperone my return to Arizona on the new train to Tucson. While Kitty had promised to pay a call the day she arrived, she later confessed she’d been indulging in the delights of a San Francisco hotel room, rummaging through sweet shops, and fingering the luxuries of S&G Gump’s, eyeing a particularly extravagant gilded mirror. Perhaps my mother had come to believe that the woman was a myth, like the engagement, and would never appear. I looked into Ma’s eyes, ringed with tears and flat with rage, and swiftly glanced away so as not to be deterred.

After a brief embrace, Kitty pushed me back and handed me a blue velvet box. “Here is the ring. We must be going.”

I plucked the ring from the box—a shining diamond solitaire of at least half a carat in a dull gold band—and slid it onto my left hand. A perfect fit. People say that the world stops at moments like these, but I felt like the world suddenly sped up and found true north. Johnny and I were meant to be together. Here was proof. How could this not be right?

Later, I could answer that question with the same flamboyant cynicism that Kitty taught me that day, a form of social play-acting, but not that Shabbat. This ring was a ticket out of my mother’s shadow. I was again dancing away from San Francisco toward the footlights, the lass in love with a sailor—or sheriff. I went to show it to my mother, who retreated as if it were cursed. But Hennie couldn’t resist. She ran up to admire the engagement band until Ma pulled her back tightly by her collar. Nathan had the sense not to come any closer.

“If we’re to make the train, we have to leave,” Kitty said. In mock horror she asked, “Are you taking all this?” while regarding my carpetbag, traveling case, and worn trunk. Then she exited to retrieve the coachman, leaving me alone with my stunned family. My mother still must have wondered how I could leave the house with this painted gentile. Maybe she was already planning suitable punishments. I turned and passed between the pocket doors to grab my hand-me-down cloak from the hook by the door. Then I turned for a final good-bye in the darkened hallway. Ma hugged Hennie to her like a shield made of flesh, while Nathan cleaved to her shoulder.

With a lurch, Papa rose from the table, passing the three frozen figures to embrace me. I rose on tiptoe, although he was only five inches taller than I was. He still smelled of the sweet yeast of the bakery, even in his Sabbath suit. He hugged me around my waist with one hand, kneading my back with the strong fingers of the other. I raised my lips to his stubbly cheek, closing my eyes as he played with the curls that escaped my bun. He rested his head on my shoulder and let his chin bite into my muscle until I flinched, a game we’d played since childhood, a sign that he would not let go. We always communicated wordlessly—in touch and gesture—a code my mother observed with distaste. I was proud to be my father’s daughter. He was such a good man, quiet and simply satisfied. I hated to leave him behind to clean up another mess of mine. He guided my right hand behind my back, stuffing a folded envelope inside my palm, closing my fingers around the rough paper. When he was sure I had it, he kissed my ear and retreated to my mother’s side.

The coachman jostled me from behind as he lugged my trunk outside. At the sound of fabric tearing, I looked up to see my mother rip Hennie’s collar on my old dress. I held Ma’s eyes as she reached up to her own collar and tore the fine material of her best dress. She turned toward Nathan as I ran out the front door, my triumphant exit trumped. I rushed outside, the cold air slapping my flushed cheeks.

“Well, that was a jolly family fare-thee-well,” said Kitty, encasing her nervousness in antic extroversion. I climbed into the coach and collapsed, stuffing my father’s envelope into the carpetbag. I leaned forward and stared through the bay window to where I’d stood just a few minutes before. I viewed my empty place at the table and Nathan’s back as he draped a sheet over the mantel mirror.

CHAPTER 3

I thought I would never reach Tombstone. By the time I did, I was no great beauty. I had sweat, and shivered, and sweat again through my traveling clothes. It was warm by day and cold at night. Stains circled my armpits, each new ring reaching outward like foam deposits on the seashore. I tucked my elbows, trying to keep my arms close. But attempt that for hours on end: it fails.

The journey lasted three days but felt like three years. The train only reached as far as Tucson, where we changed for the Tombstone stagecoach. The boom was on, with as many as a hundred people arriving weekly, so we queued up at 5:00 a.m. for a chilly 7:00 a.m. departure. Kitty warned me that this final stretch was the toughest. Given our sleeplessness and erratic eating—everything offered seemed to contain ham or bacon—I’d been skeptical. How tough could it be if Kitty had taken it round trip just to come and retrieve me?

But Kitty hadn’t exaggerated. The dusty thirteen-hour trip was bumpy. She insisted we take the front bench that faced backward so that the leather bolster wedged against the head of the coach would support our spines. What we gained in smoothness we exchanged for nausea. The journey might have been boring except for the constant fear of robbery.

We traveled in the newest of vehicles, a flat-roofed Concord coach crafted in New Hampshire. From the box above, the driver controlled a six-horse team, his face covered with a bandana. Seated beside him with a rifle for comfort was a Wells Fargo agent (by coincidence, Morgan Earp, Wyatt’s younger brother). The competition for this route was so fierce that the driver hustled the horses at a speed never intended for such a vehicle. The two-ton coach lurched, climbing steep hills, then free-falling, careening on the bends.

To maximize profit, the H. C. Walker & Company stage line packed nine passengers together in a way that forced unwanted intimacy. A childlike senorita named Marietta with a nickel-size mole above her left eye faced us from the middle bench. Sandwiched between two beefy mining engineers, she sat so near us that her knees separated ours. Despite her clean, homespun dress, her musky, days-old sweat overwhelmed us.

Experienced female travelers wore veils to create a layer of social distance as much as to keep the dust out of their eyes, mouths, and noses. I had no veil, physical or emotional, my spirits as unprotected as my face. Every feeling announced itself right on the surface. Accustomed to a sheltered life in a close-knit family, I had not yet learned to conceal my emotions from the outside world, to tip my chin down and look away. I believed that most strangers would have my best interests at heart, right down to Kitty herself, since Johnny had sent her to chaperone me.

I may have been the wildest woman of the Marcus clan, but I carried no claim on such a title beyond my front stoop. Despite my yearning for glorious adventure, the reality of stagecoach travel wasn’t half so grand. My tailbone throbbed. I lacked a plush bottom like Kitty’s to soften the ride, or the comforts of the whiskey flask passed from man to man to dull the pain and induce sleep. My molars ached from the jarring hoofbeats upon the rough, new roads not yet pounded smooth. All the
schmutz
kicked up by man and mare filled my mouth and irritated my nostrils, inducing fits of sneezing.

Kitty shifted beside me, sucking her teeth as she wiggled her backside to shove me off the turf her wide hips demanded. For three days, my chaperone had chattered away. My jaw ached from wagging in answer to her questions; outlaws on the stand underwent less grilling from the prosecution. In turn, I doubted there was a story about her I didn’t know, from her baby brother’s cholera death and the way her mother had buried all maternal feelings like a shroud with his small body, to the china pattern Kitty would buy at Gump’s in San Francisco if her husband, Harry B. Jones, Esq., finally made a killing.

The attorney had dragged Kitty to the Arizona Territories in a final effort to emerge nearer the top of the social heap, or so she said. She confessed they no longer had marital relations. Kitty was uncertain whether the inactivity was a blessing or a curse, given her husband’s ineptitude in that department, too. But she still had needs, she confided, more than most women. As a virgin, I had little advice to offer. That suited my traveling companion just fine, given she had so many opinions of her own. But when pressed about Johnny, Kitty demurred, smiling impishly, which should have signaled a red flag since he was the only topic where she was discreet.

I began yet another of those virulent sneezing fits that plagued me on the journey—a run so loud I awakened the slumbering giant of a mining engineer whose mammoth feet crowded mine. “Should I have brought an umbrella?” Kitty asked. As it turns out, I was allergic to dust. While digging for my last clean handkerchief in my carpetbag, I found Papa’s crumpled letter stuffed in a side pocket. I’d hid it there for safekeeping that Friday night I left Perry Street and had forgotten it in my distress. The discovery released the guilt I had shoved down to the bottom of my belly. Anxiety rose into my throat, aggravating my preexisting jitters. I was antsy to arrive and see if my Johnny was really
my
Johnny. I needed to prove my mother wrong: I wasn’t a wanton wastrel, but a desirable woman who deserved a life on a bigger stage lit by more than Shabbat candles.

I knew I should wait until I had privacy, but I was no paragon of patience—not like Wyatt, whose ability to outwait his opponents and nearly all provocation gave him the edge. He could spend an hour eating a vanilla ice-cream cone. Not me. So I grasped Papa’s letter, flattened the ivory envelope on my lap, then ripped it open. Out tumbled two twenty-dollar bills, which piqued the attention among men throughout the coach who I had assumed were asleep.

This was the first letter I’d ever received from my father, a man more accustomed to jotting down bakery lists than correspondence. Although he was quiet by nature, I never confused Papa’s reserve with being absent in thought or deed. He made the best of a situation that had its pluses and minuses, ever appreciative that he was alive and free in America. One lesson he gleaned from the old country before his exodus: keep your head down and avoid political involvement. That caution colored his actions in domestic affairs as well.

Papa’s letter had the power to restore the courage that had drained away when I watched my mother split her best collar. Just remembering that moment, and the way Hennie shunned my glance, tightened my stomach. The message read, in small, cramped writing:

My Dearest Sadie,

Sweet daughter, I hope you are reading this somewhere safe, with happy eyes. You will never be dead to me.
Shivah
is for corpses, not the living. You are a great joy to me, and that has not changed because we no longer live in the same house. That had to happen sooner or later if I did my job right as your father. Every bird must leave the nest.

Remember this,
shayna maidel
, where others see your outside charms, I know the beauty of your nature. Since the day you were born you have had a heart as big as your cheeks. You entered the world laughing and smiling (although later you could spit and scream with the best of them if you didn’t get your way!). That’s all right. That’s who you are. Independent and freedom-loving like our adopted land.

Mama and I are people from the old country and we see with different eyes. We made sacrifices so that you could live a new world life. Mama only holds on too tight out of fear, but I know life is a journey each pair of shoes must take on their own. Mama lives in the past. You must live in the future. You have my blessing for what it is worth. May you find love, and keep love, and have children of your own, but know that there is always and forever love in my heart for you and shelter under my roof as long as I live.

Affectionately,

Papa

I felt the gaze of strangers on my face, rough men used to seeing women cry and ignoring the spectacle. Kitty reached into my lap and snatched the bills, tucking the greenbacks into my sleeve for safekeeping. I didn’t look up, letting my tears soak the paper. With the faint scent of fresh bread, I inhaled the absolute kindness of this man who loved me, not more or less than he loved his other children, or even Rebecca, but free from the bonds of expectation. He saw me not only as I really was, but also my very best self. Papa seemed to see beyond what I envisioned as the woman I could become, if only I was brave and confident enough to place one foot in front of the other—and turn around and change paths if one direction failed me. In his eyes, I had the power to break the boundaries of the
shtetls
we replicated wherever we went, the dos and don’ts to which my mother clung.

Staring at the stationery, I recalled the games we played when I was a child sitting in Papa’s lap: putting my pointer finger in his mouth and withdrawing it as fast as I could, daring him to bite me (he did—and hard!); playing with his big ears; teasing the wisps of hair on his head up and up until it was a solitary plume on his scalp, adding a flirtatious femininity to someone so steadfastly male. Ma would rustle past and cluck her tongue, but we just waited quietly, inhaling with one breath until she took her endless busyness to another room. I often encircled the incorrectly set broken bone on his right forearm that popped out like a third wrist. He got it playing stickball on Hester Street. The idea of my hardworking father ever playing sports was nearly inconceivable, for he never played games anymore, except our little made-up ones. As for his broken bone, he always said that it hurt when there was fog. So many stories I hadn’t asked him to tell—would I still have a chance? What were his seven sisters named? Which was his favorite? Why had he left Prussia, and where were those darlings who had spoiled him as he deserved to be spoiled now?

Perhaps I dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, twilight had arrived. The temperature had dropped with the sun. I found myself shivering, and I wasn’t alone. I looked up and into the eyes of the Mexican senorita, Marietta, who had wrapped her rough-loomed shawl twice around her neck for warmth. I looked down at my knee and saw her callused hand there, and remembered a patting sensation while crying.

I moaned to Kitty about the dust in my mouth. She wiggled her hips and retrieved a brown paper sack of bright cherry candies. Kitty offered them around, creating a circle of sweetness. Marietta smiled in thanks, a few teeth missing. Nevertheless, she was a pretty little thing, with heavy ropes of black braids caught in an opalescent abalone clip. I later learned that the stunning ornament was an engagement gift from the rancher Peter Spence. They never wed, although Marietta cleaned his house and shared his bed and brought her mother to live with them.

I heard shouting from above and outside the coach, fearing the worst: robberies were more common come nightfall. Marietta, facing front, squeezed my knee between gumdrop-sticky fingers. I looked through the curtains to see Johnny Behan galloping up out of the gloom on his bay stallion, a bouquet of yellow roses clutched to his saddle horn. The passengers shuffled so that I could sit by the window; by now everyone had been thoroughly, wearyingly informed of the man’s irresistible charms. Seeing him in light of Papa’s letter, my heart opened: I’d found love with a man as good as my own father. Johnny had staked a claim on my heart and pursued me recklessly despite the difference in our ages and faiths.

Outside the window, Johnny sat tall in his saddle, making his stallion dance sideways before turning to ride beside the carriage. He tipped his cream-colored Stetson and said, “Ladies,” with the ease of someone who knew the value of his looks. My heart skipped a beat. Just shy of his thirty-sixth birthday, with lively, dark eyes; thick, curved brows; and a broad, intelligent forehead, Johnny sported a salesman’s genial smile. He knowingly revealed two rows of even, white teeth. They were legendary in a time of few dentists, when pliers were often the dental implement of choice. His was a face a woman trusted, although I would later learn Johnny could use a heart to match. Men, on the other hand, could see right through him, and his ability to reel in good women was a source of constant amusement and side bets around the poker table.

But that fresh October evening as I entered Tombstone under a dark-blue sky stretched taut as a sheet in the wind, I was the only passenger to get such an exorbitant welcome. I was terribly in love with love. I lifted my chest, and released a hairpin to let the wind sweep my curls in a way that I knew suggested a seductiveness I hadn’t the experience to support. I played the heroine of my own operetta, Josephine in
H.M.S.
Pinafore
, oblivious to all the other stories on the frontier stage, the family turf wars of
Romeo and Juliet
, the malicious manipulations of
Richard III.
I had seen the Shakespeare plays with Rebecca, but when Evil arrived with a sharp knife, I was busy examining the staging and costumes, the false gems that shined like rubies on the velvet-covered chests of actresses often decades older than the characters they played.

Johnny cantered alongside the coach, beaming as if I were Queen Victoria on parade. As the driver urged the horses on even faster in a final, mad dash to our destination at the Wells Fargo office, Johnny held a one-sided conversation with me. His words flew back on the wind, so I nodded and smiled foolishly as if I understood, when all I really wanted was that first kiss once my feet touched Tombstone dirt. I wanted Johnny’s lips on mine, his hands circling my waist, my lace-covered thighs pressing against his chaps. I wanted to lose myself in his scent of bay rum and horses. When I glanced over at Kitty, I noticed she, too, lit up at the sight of Johnny—in a way that did not reflect sisterly affection.

Suddenly, the stage screeched to a halt, bouncing back and forth on its leather-strap suspension. I crawled across knees and thighs (a man grimaced, but I ignored him), angling for the exit without pausing for propriety. When I stepped onto the running board, my knees failed. I felt dizzy, as if the world was racing ahead, while my insides fell behind. As I grabbed for purchase, Morgan Earp leapt off the coach box to the street below and reached a hand up to steady me as I stared into his amused blue eyes. That was how I met my first Earp.