The Rich Shall Inherit (48 page)

Poppy shook her head and the girl inspected her once again. “Hunger,” she said decisively. “I’ve seen those signs before.” Pulling an earthenware crock from a curtained cupboard, she took out a baguette and a slab of cheese, and tearing a hunk from each, she handed them to Poppy. “Get this down you,” she said roughly, “and a hot drink, and then we’ll see what we can do.”

Poppy glanced at the girl’s poor room, certain that she had barely enough food for herself. “No, thank you,” she said politely, “I couldn’t possibly take your food.”

“Couldn’t possibly?” The girl laughed her throaty, raucous laugh again. “Such fancy talk, Miss! And where did you learn to speak French like that?”

“From my governess in San Francisco when I was five,” she replied, eyeing the cheese hungrily.

The girl shoved it toward her. “Go on,” she said encouragingly, “eat. We can talk at the same time. And I warn you, I want to know everything—about San Francisco, the governess, the posh clothes … the lot!

“First tell me your name,” she demanded as Poppy slowly savored the rich creamy taste of the cheese.

“It’s Poppy,” she replied, taking another bite.

“Poppy! Mmm, that’s pretty. Mine is Simonette … actually it’s Berthe, but I always hated it so I changed it to Simonette. I’m usually called Netta.”

“Netta, that’s pretty too,” said Poppy, absorbed in the delicious moistness of the bread—she had eaten stale, hard loaves for so long now, she’d almost forgotten how good fresh bread really tasted.

The parrot struggled feebly against her chest, and hastily unbuttoning her jacket, she held the tiny creature in her hands,
smoothing his feathers with a gentle finger. “He’s so soft,” she told Netta eagerly. “Feel him? Isn’t he softer than silk velvet?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Netta. “I’ve never felt real silk velvet.” But her hand and her eyes were gentle as she touched the bird.

“Look at his colors,” Poppy exclaimed, “emerald, and scarlet here along his wing, and such a wonderful sapphire blue along the head. And his eyes are pure topaz. But I think he’s prettier than any of those jewels.” The parrot cocked his head, watching her through one topaz eye, and she smiled delightedly. “Why, look, Netta, he’s already feeling better!” she exclaimed.

“He’s probably as hungry as you are,” she retorted.

“But what do you suppose parrots eat?” Poppy asked, staring at her, horrified. “I’ve no money to buy him food.”

“Then for now he’ll just have to eat what you eat, won’t he?” Netta said, crumbling bread and cheese into tiny bits and offering them to him. The little bird’s sharp beak hovered over her hand for a second and then he jabbed eagerly at the crumbs.

“Just look at that,” said Netta. “I thought he was going to bite me, but he’s as gentle as a babe.” She glanced at the darkening window and turned the gas jet higher.

“It’s getting late,” said Poppy. “I’d better be on my way …”

“On your way to where?” Netta demanded. Poppy hung her head, saying nothing, and Netta hesitated for only a second. “Better stay here for a while,” she said gently, “the bed’s big enough for two—I know, I’ve tried it,” she added with a saucy wink. “And anyhow, I won’t be home tonight, what with three ships fresh in the harbor.”

She glanced at Poppy hunched in the chair, her eyes half closed with fatigue. “Ah, the hell with the ships,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what, Poppy, you just curl up on the bed there and have a rest. I have to go out for a little while, but when I come back you and I are going to Victor’s cafe for a good hot meal and a bottle of wine—but I warn you, I’ll want to know your story.”

Poppy stretched out luxuriously on the bed and Netta smiled as the tiny parrot, his green and scarlet wings clipped to restrict his flight, fluttered unsteadily onto her chest, huddling close to her. “Bloody little creature thinks you’re his mother,” she said. Her hearty laugh was the last thing Poppy remembered as sleep claimed her.

“Are you sure that’s everything?” Netta demanded later, pushing aside their finished plates of delicious lamb stew flavored with
rosemary and young parsnips, and emptying the last of their second bottle of red wine into Poppy’s glass.

“That’s all,” Poppy assured her. “Now you know everything about me.”

“Merde!”
Netta said thoughtfully. “So that’s how the rich live … I always wondered. Well, kid, you certainly learned about life the hard way. Still, my story is not much different from yours … seduced at sixteen by a friend of my father’s,
and
accused by his wife of enticing him. My father beat me for it, ripping me to shreds until my back bled. And my mother just stood there and watched. They left me senseless on the floor. When I came to, I called it quits. I’ve never seen them again.” She looked at Poppy shrewdly. “How old did you say you were?”

“I’m nineteen,” Poppy told her.

“Nineteen, huh? And how old do you think I am?”

Poppy considered. “Thirty?” she guessed generously. “Thirty-four?”

“Thanks!” snarled Netta. “I’m twenty-two.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.” Poppy grinned suddenly. “No, I’m not sorry, because it means we’re almost the same age—and I’m glad I’ve found a friend. Netta, I haven’t talked to anyone in months; I haven’t eaten a meal like this in … forever … and I haven’t been anywhere as jolly as this in … years!” She glanced around the steamy little cafe. Its tables were packed with a motley assortment of cheerful neighborhood folk and a sprinkling of blowsy laughing women, and it felt cozy and secure. She never wanted to leave it.

Her eyes sparkled as she sipped the red wine, and she stroked the parrot, perched on the table, with a gentle finger. “You know what I think?” she said, scarcely recognizing the sound of her own laughter. “I think the parrot changed my luck. He brought me to you, Netta.” Her face grew serious again as she said quietly, “I meant to … to kill myself tonight; I was going to walk out into the sea as far as I could and just let the waves take me … I didn’t want to live.”

“I know the feeling,” Netta whispered, reaching out and grasping her hand, “I’ve had it too, Poppy.”

“My problems haven’t gone away,” Poppy said quietly, “but you have given me strength to face them again. How can I ever thank you, Netta?”

“Thank?” she scoffed. “Rubbish! It’s the parrot you should thank. He’s the little ray of light that guided you here.”

“A little ray of light,” Poppy said, stroking his soft downy green breast.
“Luce,”
she murmured softly in Italian, pronouncing it “luchay.” “Then that’s your name—Luchay—my ray of light! And my poor little friend.”

“We’re all poor here,” said Netta, gathering up her shawl and her purse. “And speaking of that, I’d better get to work. Come on, Poppy, you’ll sleep well tonight after the meal and all that wine, I’ll be bound.”

Wearing a cozy old flannelette night gown of Netta’s, Poppy curled up in bed with Luchay beside her, watching as she powdered her face and rouged her cheeks. “Netta,” she said, puzzled, “where
do
you work? What exactly is it that you do?”

“Do?” repeated Netta, throwing on her shawl and marching to the door. “Why, I’m a whore, of course. I thought you knew.”

“Oh,” Poppy said. “Oh, yes, of course, how silly of me to ask….”

As the door closed behind Netta and she heard the clatter of her high heels on the naked wooden stairs, she fingered the “whore’s pearls” at her throat … maybe Madame du Barry wasn’t so wicked after all, she thought as she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

1899, FRANCE

“Of course you’ll stay,” Netta insisted the next morning. “After all,” she added, “I don’t use the bed nighttimes, do I?”

Then she went out and canvassed the other streetgirls for a job for Poppy. “She’s desperate,” she told them bluntly, “and she’s different from us; she’s not suited to be a whore. Let her clean your rooms. Come on, girls, raise your standards—and your prices … think like
high-class
tarts for a change! Imagine the luxury! To come home to clean floors, clean sheets—for those who possess them—and clean underwear—for them that wears it. And all for a few sous. After all, we have to keep that bloody little parrot in sunflower seeds, don’t we?”

To Poppy, the house had a familiar smell about it, like the cheap rooming houses of her childhood—a mixture of stale food, stale sweat, stale sex. It was tall and thin with a narrow dark staircase of splintered wood twisting upward to the very meanest room—an attic under the steeply sloped eaves, and in her new capacity as cleaner and laundress Poppy soon got to know its inmates well. With Luchay perched on her shoulder and her heavy bucket of hot soapy water, boiled over the ancient cauldron-like stove in the basement, she tried her best to wash away a century of grime.

The girl who lived in permanently stooped poverty in the sloping attic was only nineteen, Poppy’s own age, and despite her desperate hacking cough, Poppy would see her swagger off into the misty night, an artificial flush of rouge masking her pallor and a cheeky grin distracting attention from her shabby thinness. And then she would see her again the next morning, limping,
exhausted, back up the stinking stairs, often drenched from the night’s rain and coughing as though she would never stop.

“Oh, she’ll stop, all right,” said Netta angrily when Poppy asked about her. “It’s consumption—she’ll not last the winter.”

“But we must help her,” Poppy gasped, horrified. “What can we do?”

Netta shrugged, but Poppy glimpsed the bitterness in her gray-green eyes.
“You
tell me,” Netta suggested helplessly. And of course, she had no answer.

The ground floor was occupied by a fisherman’s widow with four children. She worked at the fish dock scaling and gutting fish, and though she was the cleanest woman in the house and her children’s school pinafores the whitest in the street, still the smell of fish permeated the hall. There were two rooms on each of the other three floors, each occupied by streetgirls, but the fishwoman kept well away from their kindhearted friendliness, whisking her children indoors whenever she heard their hurrying footsteps or their raucous laughter.

Poppy would hear their high heels clattering on the stairs as they hurried off to work in the evenings, and she’d hang out of the window, watching as, hands on their hips, they sauntered down the street on their way to the waterfront bars, their low-cut blouses displaying the maximum of their charms. And later she would hear them pattering back up the wooden staircase with some drunken sailor lumbering behind them, cursing as he tripped in the dark.

Alone in Netta’s comfortable sagging bed, she’d try to close her ears to the grunts and curses that penetrated the thin walls, pouring out her heart to Luchay, huddled in the curve of her neck, going over and over again the events that had brought her to this …
if only
she’d obeyed Aunt Melody, she would never have met Felipe and how different her life would have been, and
if only
she’d seen how easy it would be to love Greg instead of being so foolish, how happy she might have been …. “But then,” she told Luchay comfortingly as his bright topaz eye watched her, “I would never have found you, Luchay, would I?”

The parrot fluffed out his poor bedraggled feathers as though he were doing his best to look his most beautiful to please her, and she smiled at him. “Luchay,” she whispered despairingly as the creak of the bedsprings increased in tempo and the girl upstairs shrieked in either fear or pain. “Luchay, whatever would I do without you? You are truly the ray of light in my life. You
listen to my miserable story and you look so wise.” She glanced fearfully at the door as someone rattled the handle, but after a moment the footsteps stumbled past.
“Who knows,”
she went on softly,
“maybe someday we’ll make our fortunes. And when we do, Luchay, you will have jewels as bright as your feathers, you will have a golden perch studded with emeralds and rubies and a golden house all your own … you will be the ‘Prince of Parrots,’ Luchay. And you will be my only companion and love, because I never want to know another man as long as I live.”

Netta never brought her customers back to her room. “It ain’t much,” she told Poppy, “but it’s my home, and I don’t want those cheap bastards to set foot in here! Besides,” she added thoughtfully, “they don’t pay enough for the comfort of my bed.”

Remembering with a shudder her only experience of sex, Poppy tried not to think of what Netta did or where the “act” took place, but she’d seen enough ugly gropings in the tenement doorways and shadowy corners of the
quartier
to have a good idea.

Each morning when Netta came home she would go immediately to the washstand and fill the big washbowl with the icy water. Then she’d strip herself naked, and, shivering, she’d wash herself from head to toe. “Got to get their dirty fingerprints off me, don’t I?” she’d say, walking, casually naked, across the room and pulling on a serviceable flannel nightgown—laundered and ironed by Poppy.

Poppy had never seen anyone naked before, not even Angel, and she was astonished by Netta’s matter-of-fact attitude to her nudity and her full-bosomed, beautifully curved body. “You’re too good for them, Netta,” she blurted angrily, “you’re too beautiful, and too nice for those bastards.”

“Better watch yourself,” grinned Netta, “you’re starting to talk like me. Of course I’m too good for them, but I’ve got to make a living, don’t I? For as long as it lasts,” she added, yawning.

“What do you mean, as long as it lasts?” Poppy asked, puzzled.

“What do you see when you look out on the street? Dozens of young girls …
young
girls, Poppy. There ain’t too many whores make a living after thirty—if they’re still living and haven’t been killed by the clap.”

“The clap?” she repeated, bewildered. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Never mind, girl,” Netta murmured, closing her eyes sleepily, “you’ll learn.”

Poppy’s hands soon became red and chapped from constantly being plunged in and out of water as she struggled with the washing, thumping her wooden stick against the few worn sheets and thin towels, the tired underwear and cheap blouses, in the big metal cauldron in the basement, hauling them through the rusty wringer and stringing them up to dry on the line across the narrow sunless street. She scrubbed the floors and swept the stairs; she dusted their litter of face powder and rouge and tidied their meager possessions. And sometimes in gratitude for their friendship, she would buy a small bunch of flowers from the market at the end of the day when they were sold off for a sou, and then she’d place a single blossom in a chipped mug and leave it in each girl’s room to cheer her up in the morning when she got home.