She was visited often by her grandmother Tibbals, her father, and even occasionally by her mother. One day her mother arrived alone. She took the child to play in a creek that ran through the Clingans’ lot. The girl made a pile of wet silvery rocks. Elmina removed her own shoes and stockings and tucked up her skirt. She knelt and splashed her face with water while her hair tumbled down. She looked like a wild creature, a doe, a naiad.
“Come here,” she told her daughter. “Come see the crawdad hiding in this pool here.”
“I hear voices in the wind,” the little girl confessed. She went to meet her mother’s outstretched hand.
“What do the voices tell you?” Elmina asked.
The little girl didn’t like to say, since the voices were telling her to run away. She felt her mother’s damp fingers moving down her cheek to her shoulder. “Just my name,” the little girl said. She really did hear her name.
“Kneel down here so you can look.” Her mother’s hand moved from her shoulder to the back of her neck. “Lean forward.”
The little girl knelt with her face nearly touching the water. She saw how the surface twitched with waterbugs, how big and shivery the rocks looked. She thought she saw the crawdad’s claws under one of those rocks. “Run while you can,” the wind whispered. “Run away, Teresa. Teresa.”
“Teresa! There you are!” her grandmother Tibbals said. She was out of breath and gulping like a fish. She came down the bank, sliding in her haste, losing her footing. “You’re wanted back at the house.” She pulled the child from Elmina’s hands.
“Yes,” Elmina said. She gathered her dripping hair together, twisted it so the water streamed down her arms. “You run along now, dear, since Mrs. Clingan needs you so immediately.”
The Clingans may have been a hasty choice. Mrs. Clingan was a drunken, abusive mother. Mr. Clingan was a cardplayer who lost more than he won. There were two daughters in the family already—Mary Jane, who was six years older than Teresa, and Kate, who was four years older. “I know why you live with us,” Kate said one day when Teresa was seven years old. Kate had light brown hair and a fat face.
“She’s not to say.” Mary Jane shook her head. “You’re not to say,” she told Kate.
“I didn’t say I’d tell. I just said I know.” Kate leaned toward Teresa, her lips pinched together so the words wouldn’t pop out inadvertently.
Mary Jane dropped a hint. “It’s the same reason your mother can’t visit you alone.”
“It’s because she wants to kill you,” Kate said. “Just like she killed your brothers.”
This was instantly plausible. Wasn’t Mrs. Clingan always saying, I’ll kill you if you can’t be quiet? I’ll kill you if those dishes aren’t washed when I get home? “Just like your mother,” Teresa said, understanding, and the two girls looked at her with suddenly angry mouths and waspish little eyes.
“No,” they told her.
“It’s not anything at all like,” said Kate.
In Teresa’s will she refers to the Clingans as a bogus crew who may try to claim a blood relationship to her. She singles out Kate in particular as one of the vilest characters on earth, who once “even tried to claim that my father Wessel Harris begot me with the aid of her mother. Wessel was my father and her mother was my mother, so she said.”
“Well, someone needs to tell you,” Kate finished. “Because now your mother’s run off and no one knows where she is or what she’s up to. I’d be plenty scared if I was you.”
The wind told Teresa to leave the horrible Clingans, to run away to the creek, but now she could hear that it spoke in her mother’s voice, and she was too frightened to obey it ever again. She didn’t leave the house for several days, and she didn’t see Elmina for many years.
Mr. Clingan died. A neighbor turned the family in to the county and they were all shipped off to the county farm. Teresa went, too, her father and grandmother apparently unable or unwilling to intervene. From the farm the children were fostered out to separate homes. Teresa was now twelve.
“That I live is a wonder,” Teresa wrote later in a letter to her doctor. “But that my soul lives is a still greater wonder.” Describing herself at age twelve, she says she was “proud, sensitive, and refined clear beyond her years,” with a delicacy of perception and a purity of soul. These things she attributed entirely to her father, Wessel Harris. Blood will tell, she often liked to say. We cannot know which of these qualities—the delicacy or the purity—first attracted the attention of a young man like James Percy.
Mr. Percy came calling when she was seventeen. He sat with Teresa in the parlor of a shabby boardinghouse that catered mostly to immigrants. The most intimate business could be conducted in that parlor, and if the conversation was in English, one’s privacy was complete. James Percy’s business with Teresa was of the most intimate sort. “I want to tell you everything I see in your eyes,” he was saying. “I can read your fortune in them if you’ll only look at me.”
And then he suddenly stood. Teresa turned to see why, and there was Elmina, faintly reflected in the cracked glass of the parlor doors, in an expensive lilac dress. She didn’t seem to have aged a minute, but then the parlor was a dim room, no good for sewing or reading whatever the time of day. Elmina entered and sat on a dirty chair, her skirt billowing in a lilac froth about her legs. “Aren’t you pretty?” she said to Teresa. “Could I have just a moment alone with you, dear? If the gentleman will kindly excuse us?”
Teresa caught James’s hand. “Don’t go,” she said, and he sat again.
“Which of us is the prettier, do you think?” Elmina asked him. She was flirting, in her costly dress, with her hair coiled about her head like a snake. Teresa might have been in rags by comparison.
“I couldn’t possibly choose,” James said, “when faced with two such beautiful women.”
“Now you’re teasing me. Though there are those think I’ve held up rather well for such an old lady, I won’t deny it. But beauty can’t last forever. That’s why a woman wants children. So her beauty will survive her. It pleases a beautiful woman to have a beautiful daughter.”
“You must be very pleased.”
“Teresa is my only living child,” Elmina said. “Naturally I’m proud of her.”
It wasn’t until Elmina left that Teresa realized she was still allowing James to hold her hand. He tried to kiss her then, because that was the idea her fingers had given him. That night Teresa blocked her door with a chair and kept her window closed.
The next day Kate Clingan drove by. She was a swollen tick of a woman but, even so, already married, and really her name now was Kate Gray. “Your father has died,” she said. She didn’t even get out of the wagon to say this. “He left six hundred acres of land and he left it to you instead of your mother. It only goes to Elmina if you die before she does. I thought you should know. I thought you should know she was there when they read the will and she said it was her land from her father, not your land from yours.”
Teresa left New York hastily at the age of seventeen and in the company of James Percy. She arrived in San Francisco when she was twenty-three. She was calling herself Mrs. Percy in 1870 when Mary Ellen Pleasant first met her, although James was by then in San Quentin. He’d been caught robbing drunken farmboys in the bars of the Barbary Coast.
Teresa had asked the Bank of California for a loan to see her past this drop in income. On the application was a space for her maiden name, in which she wrote “Clingan,” and a space for her mother’s name, in which she wrote simply the word “mother.”
Mary Ellen Pleasant thought her very lovely and very sad. “I own six hundred acres in New York,” Teresa told her coolly. She was wearing a patched dress, a glass brooch, and shoes that didn’t quite fit.
It must be noted that extensive rebuttal for all the above was supplied over the years in which Teresa Bell’s estate was contested. Both Mary Jane and Kate testified that Teresa was their sister, the youngest daughter of John and Bridget Cli
ngan. Their contention was supported by baptismal records.
Their mother was a drunk, but had never tried to kill anyone, they said. Teresa went to live with Wessel Harris and his wife, Elmina, when she was fostered off the county farm. He was no blood relation and he never did adopt her. Any land he might have owned was certainly not left to her.
Perhaps in some one great heroic act
The soul its own redemption may attract
And thus from sin and shame swift fly
Made fit and ready to meet the Eternal eye
Ah, to live until all is dead within us
But ambition and that live to mock us!*
*Opening to Teresa Bell’s Last Will and Testament.
TWO
according to official policy, abandoned girls could remain as wards at the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home until they were sixteen or, in special cases, even older, but boys weren’t kept much past their twelfth birthdays. After this age, the danger of hoodlumism was seen to increase sharply.
In the winter of 1890, truancy was all the fashion; the boys had to be continually hunted down and punished. Lizzie had never seen such a season for starvation and isolation and paddlings, but no penalty proved a deterrent. The draw was the Presidio and the sight of soldiers marching back and forth on Van Ness.
“It’s worth the licking any lady can hand out,” twelve-year-old Tom Branan told Lizzie confidentially, just before he left the Home to work on a farm south of San Jose. “You all don’t hit hard enough to stop us.” He was standing in Lizzie’s entryway on the Monday after the séance, with a red runny nose and a thickly inked note from Nell.
“Your friend Mammy Pleasant has just sent over a basket of food,” Nell had written, pressing hard enough to tear the paper. “Including several chickens it will take a whole morning to pluck. Please join us for lunch.” And to make the prospect as uninviting as possible—“Boxty will also be served.”
Lizzie ate only rarely at the Ark, and only when invited. She would have liked to dine there more often, as food tasted so much better when taken with conversation. She fully enjoyed the company of the teachers—warm, impassioned Mrs. Lake, who taught the middles, and tiny, practical Miss Stevens, who taught the littles.
Miss Stevens had red hair, freckled skin thin as paper, and eyes the same green as Chinese tea. Her particular enthusiasm was nature studies. She was a woman who took the world as she found it, and did so with great interest if not actual approval. She had no problem showing small children a praying mantis devouring its mate, a rabbit eating its young, a large crab ripping the leg off another, smaller crab. She delighted in pulling the petals from flowers and, in this context, could talk about pistils and stamens, could even say the word “ovary” to an entire class with a great loud “O” to begin it and no sign of hesitation. In her spare time, for dissipation, she dissected.
She ran the littles with an organizational genius that bordered on military, but was actually, she told Lizzie, adapted from the habits of migratory geese. When she took the children out, they walked behind her in a V formation, only somewhat narrowed so they all stayed out of the street.
She’d recently joined a ladies’ debating society. Mrs. Lake had complained to Lizzie that the discourse at table was increasingly competitive as a result. Lizzie sometimes wondered about the educational progression that sent children from the strict empiricism of Miss Stevens into the classroom of the sentimental Mrs. Lake. Fortunately, educational policy was not her concern.
But Lizzie liked picking over issues: the morality of hunting as sport, voting rights for women, the Hawaii question, separate schools for the city’s Chinese children. She guessed she would enjoy those dinner-table debates.
Yet she could not impose. The staff would suspect her of suspecting them; they would think her a spy. “We take the same meals as the wards,” Nell told Lizzie often when they were discussing expenditures, and of course, Lizzie had never thought otherwise. Nell periodically asked board members to lunch just to show there was nothing to hide, and she was already plenty offended to be doing so.
Apparently it was Lizzie’s turn to enjoy this hospitality again. She arrived early at the Ark and found the children huddled in the yard. The cause was a stray dog—some sort of terrier, with coarse gray fur and a white belly, ludicrous white tufts like fishing lures at its cheeks, and a lively, intelligent face. The children told her the dog had belonged to a little boy who’d lived on Nob Hill until he died of influenza.
Lizzie couldn’t imagine how they could know this unless the dog himself had talked, but before she could say so, Mrs. Lake supplied even more details. The dog collapsed on the boy’s grave, she reported to Lizzie tremulously, refusing all food and consolation and howling until the neighbors threatened to shoot it as a mercy to everyone involved. By the time it arrived at the Home it was half starved, and covered with fleas. Mrs. Lake’s eyes ran with sympathetic tears. She went to give it another pat.
“Essence of Lake,” Nell said sniffily to Lizzie. “Don’t look half starved to me. Don’t look one-quarter starved. But I’ll grant you the fleas.”
Lizzie nodded, as she was too distraught now to speak. She averted her eyes so Nell wouldn’t see them. Dogs were just too good for this wicked world!
But she had to concede she saw no signs of noble grief. She watched the dog provoking the orange cat into stiff, furious poses, tangling among the children’s legs as they played in the cold, nosing in their pockets for scraps from breakfast. Lizzie didn’t want some stray eating the bread that the Swain bakery donated for the children. Yet as treasurer she made no objection to its remaining, even said it could come inside, sandy and germy as it was, whenever the pound man was sighted in the neighborhood. How could she do otherwise? Weren’t the children all strays themselves?
She noted the coincidence of a dog’s showing up when Mrs. Pleasant had predicted a dog. She didn’t really believe in omens, but she couldn’t help looking for them. This dog struck her as mostly gray, but there were those bits of white. “What color do you think it is?” she asked Nell, who answered that it was so grimy even the white was gray.
Lizzie saw little Jenny standing alone in the sand, but they didn’t speak and Lizzie was relieved to see Jenny ignore her. The secret of their nighttime excursion seemed to be safe. Lizzie was also the tiniest bit hurt. This was a preposterous feeling, and she disregarded it.
She was not currently inclined to credit the medieval festival kidnapping attempt. It was too overheated, too much like something Lizzie herself would make up, springing into her head from the pages of a book. Such things didn’t happen, not in modern-day San Francisco.
She was also less and less sure of the wealthy father. No secretly wealthy child had sheltered with them yet. How could sullen little Jenny be the first? In short, there was really no reason to think much more upon her, and Lizzie didn’t plan to do so. “Come with me,” Nell said, and Lizzie followed her inside.
On the way downstairs Lizzie raised the question of hiring a devout, hardworking Christian boy from Chinatown. Nell said it was not to be thought of, Lizzie knew their budget as well as Nell did. Better! Did he even speak English? Nell asked, and was annoyed when Lizzie did not know. Nell did not have the time to be forever pointing and gesturing when she needed a thing done.
THREE
On the kitchen counter, surrounded by baskets of onions, lemons, jars of jelly, and an extravagant amount of spilt flour, a note had been caught under a teacup. Nell stood with her round fists on her round hips while Lizzie read it. “For Miss Hayes, to distribute as she sees fit,” Mrs. Pleasant had written in her twisty hand, and also a recipe for the chicken.
Lizzie was both pleased and discomfited to have been so singled out. Mostly she was surprised. “How kind,” she said uncertainly. Don’t eat or drink anything, Mrs. Bell had told her.
Nell’s eyes were sharp as pins. “The two of you are such chums now,” she said. “Had such a gay time together. She’s a
lso sent you rose-hip wine. Now there’s all we need, to see poor blind Mrs. Wright in her cups.”
The unspoken point here, the message in Nell’s careless tone and rigid mouth and pinprick eyes, was Lizzie’s drunken return from the House of Mystery. Lizzie refused to defend herself. Instead, as demonstration of her own clear conscience, she took the wine and two glasses and went immediately up to Mrs. Wright’s first-floor apartment. I can be anyone I like, she thought to herself. I care nothing for appearances. If it all results in generous donations of food to orphans, where’s the harm?
Mrs. Wright was more than eighty years old, a lonely soul who had survived most of her friends and the whole of her family. She’d lost her money in the rigged market of 1879, was one of those women who’d clustered each morning on Leidesdorff Street, hoping to see her shares of Sierra Nevada Mining turn to silver again. Such women were known in San Francisco as mud hens. On each new day, as the stock market opened, they were a little muddier, mothier, and more insane.
The Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home had gathered Mrs. Wright in when she went blind as well as broke. Although she now kept herself clean as could be, the room smelled of camphor and the insides of old shoes. There was another smell, too, which Lizzie identified simply as age.
“We have Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant to thank for the wine,” Lizzie told her. She turned her glass and watched the liquid in it spin. “It’s a lovely color, a pale gold. Did you ever meet Mrs. Pleasant?”
“I recollect her calling on the Barclays once when I was there.” Mrs. Wright’s dentures were too large; they filled her s’s with spit. She’d chosen them deliberately, since the larger were the same price as the smaller. Value for money. “Their girl had just married and they must have invited her, people always used to, never expecting her to come, you understand. But she did, and she knew her mistake right away. So she just took a tray from one of the servants and began to pass it. I remember thinking that was clever. She was quick as they make ’em. Avoided the awkwardness, and half the guests didn’t even guess. Nobody looks at the servants, don’t you know.”
Sister Noon Page 9
