She took another bite of potato, less pleased with the taste this time. Then she heard someone who shouldn’t have been there coming soft and halting down the stairs.
During this period, an eleven-year-old girl named Maud Curry also lived as a ward at the Brown Ark. Maud was a thin child, with white-blond hair that coiled down her neck so thickly it was kept cut short, to prevent the abundance from sapping her strength. Maud’s mother was consumptive and had been separated from her daughter for the child’s own health. Her father had owned a small dry-goods store, but it had been embezzled away by his bookkeeper. Unable to bear presenting his darling, ailing wife with bankruptcy and failure, he brought Maud one morning to the Ark, kissed her, told her he would return for her in a day or so, and disappeared. He was by nature a cheerful, hearty man, and he had never given any outward sign of distress.
It might have been easier on Maud if he hadn’t dissembled so persuasively. As she saw the days pass and his promises turn to lies, she began to suspect his every emotion: Had he ever been happy with her and her mother? Had he ever intended to stay? Had he ever loved them?
Her mother’s health was not improved by her father’s desertion. She sent Maud many tender letters, but often they were not even in her own hand and she did not pretend that Maud was coming home soon.
After the initial shock, Maud’s unhappiness settled so deep inside her she was rarely aware of it. She was her father’s daughter. She made a place for herself among the other wards as someone who was ready for anything. “Maud is a sport,” the boys said admiringly. “Maud will stop at nothing.”
At least she had a mother and a father. At the Brown Ark, that counted for something. It was the first question they asked when a new child arrived. They’d asked it of Jenny Ijub. Did she have a mother? A father? Anybody?
Jenny Ijub was not settling in. She was small, but without the ingratiating manner that might have turned this to her advantage. She refused to be dressed and carried about like a doll, though this would have vastly improved her popularity. Lizzie believed her to be four years old, but she was, in fact, five. She had told the other children that her friend, Mrs. Pleasant, was sending her a special gift, loved her dearly, would be coming to take her away soon. This was what she had made of Mrs. Pleasant’s promises.
Maud had once said something too much like this herself, had even believed it. She’d been made to look a fool. By the time of Jenny’s arrival, Maud had lived at the Ark for almost a year. Jenny’s assertions were preposterous. Jenny was trying to make fools of them all. Maud held Jenny’s nose and mouth closed until she confessed as much. She pinched Jenny’s nose hard enough to leave fingerprints.
“She sleepwalks,” Maud told the matron when questioned about the bruising. “And she’s such a liar! If there’s one thing I can’t bear, it’s a liar.”
She’d heard the matron say this herself often enough to know it would find its mark. “So a friend is coming to fetch you?” Nell asked Jenny. “And what friend would that be? You’ll find no friends here, missy, if you can’t learn to be truthful.”
The warning had no apparent effect. Maud told the other children that Jenny boasted she’d owned a pony, a parrot, a silver cup with her initials, dresses, and dolls. Her mother had allowed her lemon sticks whenever she liked, had kept a vase full of them on a low table within Jenny’s reach. Her lies grew more and more fanciful. Her father had been as rich as a sultan. She believed in fairies, because she had actually seen them. She’d seen ghosts and angels, too. She didn’t believe in God. Before a week had passed, everyone at the Brown Ark knew you couldn’t trust a thing Jenny said.
Even Jenny was persuaded. Her memories tangled into the things Maud reported. Jenny thought there had been a pony, dresses, and candies, but apparently these were lies. And more confusing, she didn’t remember telling Maud anything. She vowed to say nothing about herself to anyone—she already hated them all—but in the midst of her rigorous silence, her lies carried on without her.
Once her untruthfulness was known, she became an easy target for pranks. Cups of sand were poured into her shoes at night, followed by cups of water. Imogene Reed caught a fat black spider and saved it in a glass, to be dropped onto Jenny’s face as she slept. The cores of several apples were stuffed into her pillowcase.
The food at the Brown Ark was not what Jenny was used to. The discipline was also a hardship. She’d never before been expected to stay voluntarily in her chair, with its terrible spindled back, for hours at a time. She had never been asked to envision God’s disappointment in her. She had not been told to keep so clean. She reacted against confinement like a wild animal. She paced in her cage.
It was Jenny, then, whom Lizzie heard on the stairs. When Lizzie turned around, there she was, her eyes brooding, her hair wild as a nest of sticks. She had been unable to do up the laces at the back of her dress, but was otherwise fully clothed.
“Jenny Ijub,” Lizzie said. “Little Jenny. You frightened me. You should be in bed.”
“I know.” Jenny began to back upstairs, her legs so short each step was a difficulty. Lizzie caught her by the arm. What a twig it was! Lizzie’s fingers wrapped about it and squeezed, and she could feel right down to the bone.
“Where were you going?”
“Nowhere.”
“All dressed up to go nowhere? It won’t do, miss. I know you’re fond of deceits. I’ll have the truth from you now.”
“I wanted the cat,” Jenny said. “The stripe cat.”
“The cats don’t come inside.”
“I didn’t know.”
Jenny’s voice was unconvincing, but she met Lizzie’s eyes steadily. The look on her face surprised Lizzie. It was an altogether adult look. It was anger.
“You know this very well, Jenny. Someone let the orange cat in today and it killed a lovely little bird. Jesus hates to hear a child lie.”
“I can’t sleep,” Jenny said, her chin coming up and her mouth setting. “I want to go out.”
Lizzie turned Jenny away, intending to march her smartly upstairs. Instead she fastened up the back of Jenny’s dress. She smoothed her own hair with one hand. “Get your coat. I won’t have you catching a chill. Matron has enough to do without nursing you.”
She fetched her own coat, too. Complying with Jenny’s wishes made no sense, but this seemed to be exactly the part that appealed to Lizzie. You don’t have to be the same person your whole life, she told herself. She was excited to see that she could be impulsive, unpredictable. They don’t expect that from me, she thought. She would show them. She had no idea at all who they were.
THREE
nothing could have been more familiar than the walk in and out of the Brown Ark, but Lizzie had seldom done it at night. She was disoriented, exhilarated by the darkness and her own strange behavior. Everything common, the garbage and ash barrels, the cellar door, the dunes, was transformed into something she’d never seen before. She could be underwater, or in another century.
It was a clear, dry winter night. No streetlights lit this part of the city yet, and the moon had receded higher and smaller and dimmer in the sky. There were a preposterous number of stars. Who could ever need so many? Lizzie raised her chin to look at them all, strung like beads along the telegraph wires, scattered in handfuls across the netted void.
The cold air made a mist of her breath. A scratchy wind came over the dunes and into the sleeves of her coat. The orange cat was lurking by the door. It took off into the scrub, then turned to watch them. “You’re a bad one,” she told it, softly, but she knew it heard. Lizzie could see the unearthly jewels of its eyes.
What now? It was too late to get the buggy. Jenny was too small to walk more than a few blocks. Lizzie had gotten this far on momentum, but now she had to invent something. Now she had to have a plan.
“Where are we going?” Jenny asked.
“Where would you like to go?”
“The ducks.”
Lizzie had no idea where that m
ight be, but since they weren’t going there, it hardly mattered. “The ducks are asleep.”
“Wake them,” suggested Jenny.
There was really only one destination that Lizzie could think of within walking distance. She took Jenny’s hand and started off. She wasn’t sure exactly how late it was. There were still lights far away in the city, but no one else seemed to be abroad.
The streets were unpaved and full of obstacles, stones and dips and horse droppings. Lizzie was not used to walking with a child. People credited her with maternal instincts simply because she volunteered at the Brown Ark, but as treasurer, she worked solely with adults and accounts. She was actually quite awkward around the young wards. Jenny’s steps were so small. She labored on the uphill slope to Sutter Street. Lizzie recalculated how long the few blocks would take, and then leaned over and hoisted Jenny. “You’re a bigger girl than I thought,” she said, trying to keep the disapproval out of her voice. She could smell Jenny’s hair, a stale-molasses smell, not entirely pleasant. If she were mine, Lizzie thought, I would keep her as clean as a kitten.
Jenny refused to put her arms around Lizzie, which would have helped balance her. “Where are we going?” she asked again.
“Do you want to go back?”
“No.”
Lizzie turned left at the thorny rose garden of Trinity Church. The wind picked up considerably. A man walked ahead of them, going their same direction on Bush Street. She put Jenny down, glad for a reason to fall farther behind him.
“Will we ever go back?” asked Jenny.
“Yes, of course. Soon. We’re just taking the air.”
The man had heard them. He turned, but only briefly. Lizzie wondered who he imagined they were, what he imagined they were doing. A woman evinced her class in a variety of ways; Lizzie was good at reading the clues herself and assumed that she was also good at sending them. An unescorted woman could always be misunderstood, but surely the presence of a child conferred respectability. In any case, the man appeared uninterested.
It was very cold. Lizzie began to wish she’d sent Jenny straight back to bed. Why in the world hadn’t she? She wished for a different place to go. She wished for lights and more people, or absolute dark and fewer.
“When I was just a little girl like you, you’d hear coyotes out here at night,” Lizzie said. “The city hadn’t come this far yet. I saw a horse race near this very spot with those big golden horses the Spanish had. It was Diego Estenegas’s sixteenth birthday. We had cascarones. Do you know what cascarones are?”
“No.”
“Eggshells filled with perfume and tinsel and flour. You break them over people’s heads. Even my father came home streaked with flour.”
“Why?”
“My father did business with the Estenegas family. He brokered their beef to local hotels. They were kind enough to include me in the invitation. It was a party.”
Jenny sat down in the dirt. “Something’s in my shoe,” she said. She removed it.
Lizzie was forced to squat beside her. She took Jenny’s shoe, shook out a thin stream of sand, like the drift in an hourglass. Lizzie had been to few enough parties as a child. Perhaps that was why this one remained so vivid. How could it be so long ago? She could see her mother, her hair falling from its pins, brandishing an eggshell, but that couldn’t have happened, it must have been someone else’s mother.
The Spanish women had been beautiful, with their bright dresses and diamond haircombs. Though some had married American husbands, few of the men had taken American wives. Were there really so many fewer Spanish families now, which was the way it seemed, or had the city simply filled in around them with Italians and Irish and Chinese? Diego Estenegas was like a prince and smiled once at Lizzie so she always remembered it.
Her father would have been furious with her if he’d known she was waiting for a Spanish prince. Her mother would have sent her to bed until she got over the idea. Because she’d managed to keep it a secret, she never had gotten over it.
“You might be Spanish, Jenny,” Lizzie said, “what with your dark eyes and hair. ¿Hablas español?”
Jenny didn’t answer. Lizzie replaced her shoe and picked her up. The man was gone. The ground was level again.
The sidewalk began on Octavia Street and ran beneath the blue-gum eucalyptus trees. Mary Ellen Pleasant had planted these herself, only a few years before, but they had grown quickly and were already tall by San Francisco standards. Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to use the bark and the seeds in her brews. Lizzie looked up the trunk to where the leaves hung, clustered and limp as Japanese wind chimes. The trees gave off the smell of unripened lemons.
Lizzie set Jenny down. The House of Mystery was dark, except for one window on the second floor. Its curtains were drawn, and glowed faintly with a backlight of gold. A dog barked in the distance; Lizzie couldn’t tell whether it was inside the house or out. “Have you ever been here?” Lizzie asked.
“No.”
“I’ve been to tea here. You can’t imagine how beautiful it is. You can’t tell from the outside.”
“Like a palace?” Jenny asked.
Lizzie had never been to a palace. “Inside, yes. Exactly like.”
Suddenly, all around the quiet mansion with its homey golden window was the illusion of tumult. Clouds flew across the sky like enormous birds, making the moonlight blink on and off so the whole landscape flickered. The shadows of the trees scudded over the ground; the wind rattled the leaves.
In all that movement there was no person. Lizzie wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. Reporters sometimes flocked outside the House of Mystery, pigeons pecking for crumbs. Occasionally someone sneaked into the yard to dig for the diamond necklaces Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to have buried there.
Quite inexplicably, everything combined to unnerve Lizzie—the lack of people, the flying clouds, the witches’-brew smell, the single lit window, the Wilkie Collins book at home that she was halfway through. The string of women who’d been murdered on the streets of Whitechapel a year or so ago.
There was a thought Lizzie wished she hadn’t had! She tried desperately to unthink it. Diego Estenegas smiling at her.
No good! The women were fed with poisoned grapes.
Golden horses! Diamond haircombs! Diamond necklaces! Their hearts cut out as if they were voodoo chickens! Lizzie’s breath was shallow and fast.
Jenny yawned and shivered. Lizzie picked her up and started back to the Ark, moving now as quickly as she could. On Bush Street they passed a pair of young men walking arm in arm. Lizzie heard their footsteps first and was relieved to see that there were two of them, and both apparently sober.
The men had almost passed before one of them spoke. “Are you an idiot?” he asked, in a tone no one had used with her since her father died. She turned to make sure he was addressing her and not his companion, and this allowed him to come too close. “Out here after dark with a child?” He was shaking his head. “What kind of a mother are you?”
The other man spoke next. “What kind of woman walks the streets at night? Is that what you want men to think?”
They were at least twenty years younger than she, and not so nicely dressed. She would not be chastised by boys. “How does it concern you?”
“We’re compelled to see you safely home. It wasn’t our plan for the evening.”
“Nor is it my plan now.”
“We don’t want you,” said Jenny.
“Go away,” said Lizzie. She used her public-speaking voice and she expected to be obeyed. “You must see I wouldn’t be here without a compelling reason. You must see that I wouldn’t have brought this child out into the cold and dark, in the dead of winter, on a whim.” There was an uneven place in the road. Lizzie stumbled.
One man offered his arm. One man offered to take Jenny.
Lizzie refused both offers. She carried Jenny without stopping, all the way to the edge of the Brown Ark’s sandy yard, though her arms and back ached as a resu
lt. The men strolled beside her, smoking cigars and continuing a private conversation about a friend named Darby who’d recently fallen down a flight of stairs and yet was planning a balloon ascension. Lizzie tried twice more to send them off, but they were enjoying her embarrassment too much. It was highly likely that one, at least, had blue eyes, but Lizzie refused to permit either of them the dignity of being portentous. There’d be plenty more blue-eyed men to choose from, men she liked better. When she turned in at the Ark, they finally left her, tipping their hats and congratulating themselves, no doubt, on their fine manners.
Lizzie was so angry her jaw hurt. She paused outside to remove Jenny’s shoes and brush the sand from her stockings. “Let’s not tell,” she suggested. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes,” said Jenny. Lizzie suspected she excelled at it.
“Of course, if they ask us right out, did you walk to Mrs. Pleasant’s last night, we won’t lie,” Lizzie added. “You must never tell a lie, Jenny.”
She led Jenny up the stairs to her cot, helped her undress and get into her nightgown. There was no movement or sound; the abandoned girls slept like princesses, each with a scuffed pair of shoes waiting by the bed.
Lizzie returned to the cupola, wishing for her bed at home. She could not get comfortable; she was not tired enough. Cold, anger, and the itchy settee kept her awake. Her first escapade, and nothing had come of it but her own ridiculous panic and the insults of chivalrous men. She had been laughed at in the public streets.
But by the morning she saw things quite differently. She had gotten away with it completely. Surely her impulsiveness could only improve. It just wanted practice.
FOUR
By morning Lizzie was finally tired. She went home for a restorative nap. On the breakfast table, she found an invitation from the Putnams. “I’ll watch over Lizzie until the day she weds,” Mrs. Putnam had once promised Lizzie’s mother, and she’d been as good as her word. Lizzie’s mother was on her deathbed at the time, so the promise was a binding one. So many people watching over Lizzie! Of course, no one had imagined Lizzie’s wedding day to be quite so far off as it was proving.
Sister Noon Page 6
