Sister Noon

by Karen Joy Fowler

  She was composed enough now to pour her tea without having her hands shake, busied herself with the cream. She did so not because she wanted tea, but to demonstrate how wide of the mark he’d shot. She didn’t entertain this preposterous lie for a moment, and showed it by turning to him a face as unperturbed as pond water. That he expected payment for this insult! “Secondly, I just happen to get the care of her. A remarkable coincidence!”

  Mr. Finney leaned in. She saw his face reflected in a silver teapot, the nose as big as a potato. When she looked back up to his actual face it was less handsome as well. There was a sheen of oil on his forehead, drops of champagne in his moustache. In the golden light, his eyes were the color of mud. She was amazed she’d ever thought him nice to look at.

  “No coincidence,” he said. “Mrs. Pleasant brought your sister to you. She knew what she was doing. She was tidying up. I worked for her once, she’s a great tidier.”

  “She’s not. Quite the opposite. That’s thirdly. Fourthly my father was too old.”

  “He was old. The—event—didn’t proceed smoothly, or so I’m informed. And yet not too old, as it happened.”

  Lizzie didn’t remember that she’d ever been more affronted. This had the brief charm of novelty, and then she’d had more than enough. She left, her tea untasted, her sandwich barely touched, and the bill to fall to Mr. Finney’s account. She strode through the tables and past a group of women, which now contained Mrs. Hallis. Mrs. Hallis stood and Lizzie acknowledged her. She hoped faintly that this marked the first moment she’d been seen. She hoped Mrs. Hallis hadn’t watched while Mr. Finney passed his billets-doux. But it no longer seemed a large concern.

  When she stepped into the white sunlight of Annie Street, she decided to stroll along Market for a while before catching the streetcar. She thought that Mr. Finney might have followed her, but he hadn’t, which was too bad, because while she was walking she thought of a fifthly and sixthly she could have delivered, but she felt no temptation to go back.

  She passed a street vendor who tried to lure her into a game with cups and a pea, but she’d had quite enough of that sort of thing. He would hide the pea under one of the cups and she would find it or she wouldn’t; none of that would be the point. All the while, just like Mr. Finney, he’d be sizing her up: How much did she have, how much would she play, how much could he take? How great a fool was she?

  FIVE

  adisciplined imagination is a useful tool in avoiding unpleasant thoughts. An unbridled imagination carries you straight to them. Lizzie went home and read three novels, one after the other, no daylight between, and no recollection of any of them. She then helped six other ladies dust and scrub St. Luke’s in preparation for Easter week. She attended two piano recitals, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. She called on donors. And when she’d finished all this, less than two days had passed since her meeting with Mr. Finney.

  The weather turned unusually warm, and Miss Stevens seized her chance to take the littles on a picnic to Ocean Beach to see the rock formations. “Which is strongest,” Miss Stevens would ask the littles, “air, water, or stone?” and then show them the smoothly carved pools, caves, and keyholes. This always came as such a surprise to children and could be made to carry some valuable life lessons as well.

  She sent Ti Wong to Lizzie with a note. Would Lizzie like to go to the seashore? Miss Stevens needed another adult to chaperone and everyone else was busy. Lizzie was never busy, but Miss Stevens was too polite to say so.

  The beach was crowded. There were men in wool swimming costumes, although the water was far too cold for actual swimming. They waded and their feet turned an unappetizingly fishy blue. Women protected themselves from sudden bursts of sun and wind with colored parasols. An Irish couple had made a windbreak of a bedsheet and were charging people a penny apiece to shelter beside it. There was a cart selling chips of ice and bottles of beer. There was a long table on which Charlie the Bird Man had arranged his canary cages. Charlie’s canaries walked tightropes, sat in chairs, and fired tiny cannons triggered with strings. One canary flew into the crowd, landing on hats, picking out pigeons for Charlie to pester for money.

  Like so many other men in San Francisco, Charlie had been unlucky in love. He’d been robbed on his honeymoon night, as he would tell anyone who’d listen, robbed by his bride. “She took my money, my clothes, my heart,” he said, in Lizzie’s general direction. His tone was accusing. “All she left me was the birds.”

  He sent a canary to Lizzie’s shoulder. It took hold of her earlobe in a bite so gentle it was almost a kiss. The littles surrounded her, pleading for the bird themselves, reaching out their fingers enticingly, driving it deeper into her hair. It murmured in a way that tingled on the curve of Lizzie’s neck. Charlie whistled, and the bird came back to him, just like a dog.

  Ti Wong had made the boys a red kite with paste and paint, wood and newsprint. It was shaped vaguely like a falcon, which Charlie said would agitate the canaries, so Miss Stevens sent the boys far down the beach to fly it. They ran along the sand, throwing the kite into the air, but were unable to keep it aloft. Eventually it fell—like Icarus, Miss Stevens pointed out—into the sea and dissolved. When pulled in, only the crossbar remained. The boys threw it back and reeled it in repeatedly, a sort of fishing game, but requiring no patience or experience. They played tag with the waves, dashing in and out, until they were wet to the knees and beyond.

  Jenny dropped her sandwich. “Now it’s a sandwich,” Miss Stevens told her gaily. “Brush it off, dear. A little grit won’t hurt.” She explained that birds needed just that additional grit as an aid to digestion.

  Lizzie had determined to pay Jenny no special attentions. Instead, she found herself aware of Jenny’s whereabouts at every moment. Lizzie traded sandwiches with her and ate the sandy one herself. Jenny did not say thank you. If only Maud were there! Maud would coax her into better behavior.

  They all went to climb the stairs to the Cliff House. From there they turned to face Seal Rocks. “Actually,” Miss Stevens said, “those are sea lions, not seals. You can tell by the ears, which are smaller. And their flippers are larger than a seal’s would be.” She’d brought opera glasses so the children could see nature close up and detailed. The sea lions lay in the clefts of the rocks. Now and then one would slide languidly into the water, then somersault back onto the rock, its spotted fur newly polished by the water.

  “The Costanoan Indians used to tell a story about Seal Rocks,” Lizzie told the children standing nearest her. Nobody encouraged her to continue, but nobody moved away, either. “One day a beautiful woman appeared on the beach here to two little girls. She warned them of an attack by sea from another tribe across the bay. To protect them, she gave them three wishes.

  “First they wished for a great fog so the boats of the enemy would be lost. Then they wished for a great storm so the boats of the enemy would be destroyed. Then they wished to turn the rival warriors into sea lions. And that’s the real reason there are sea lions on the coast here.” How many cultures told stories in which everyone was saved through the cunning of little girls? What a shame the Costanoans were gone now, little girls with all the rest of them.

  “I would have wished for more wishes,” Matthew Burton said, the way children always do, always will. And then, “Wouldn’t the third wish have been enough? Why did they need the first two?” Matthew was Miss Stevens’s ideal pupil, methodical, logical to a fault.

  Jenny passed Lizzie the opera glasses. One of the sea lions yawned. Through the glasses Lizzie could see a fishy flotsam in its throat. The sea lion closed its mouth and turned its head so that it seemed to look right at her. Its eyes were soft as a cow’s. Lizzie lowered the glasses and the sea lion didn’t turn away.

  Out past Seal Rocks, on the horizon, a boat with a white sail floated sleepily. An orange-and-blue hot-air balloon drifted over the water. Sunshine dazzled off the windows of the Cliff House in short, sharp flashes that made Lizzie worry
about headache. She looked upward instead, to Sutro Heights and the line of white plaster statues on the bluff.

  Without asking permission, the children were already running up the hill and scrambling down to the cove on the far side of the Cliff House. Over the noise of the ocean, the sea lions, the gulls, they could later claim not to have heard anyone calling them back. This left the women with no choice but to follow. The descent was steep.

  In spite of a large, enticing peanut stand by the cliff face, it was less crowded here. A dangerous undertow kept people out of the water, and the littles were sternly warned of this. Other children, children who’d come with their parents, were begging for peanuts, but the wards of the Brown Ark knew better than to ask. Lizzie saw Jenny pick up some discarded hulls, look hopefully inside.

  The tide had spit seaweed and slivers of wood onto the sand. Some of the wood was blackened and might well have been all that remained of the Parallel, a schooner that had foundered just off Point Lobos a year or so before. The Parallel had been loaded with dynamite. They’d heard the explosion way back at the Brown Ark, and it had broken every window in the Cliff House. Miss Stevens explained how a sound could break glass. Like magic!

  Lizzie stationed herself between the children and the water. This was a precaution, but it also allowed her a chance to be alone. She wanted to imagine the things the ocean hid, fish with bulbous eyes, forests of coral, clams the size of bathtubs. She wanted a moment in which to feel her life for what it was, an inconsequential bit of noise at the edge of something deep and vast.

  She picked her way through a scramble of sand verbena, its leaves thick, flat, and coated with salt. She disturbed several small crabs, sand fleas, and a darkly colored sea gull with a red bill and a black tail. It leapt away, skimmed along the water, rode the updraft just above the foam. Lizzie knelt and pressed her palm into the wet sand. She rose and wiped her hand on her skirt. Water seeped into the pools her fingertips had made. Down the beach she could see Jenny collecting a handful of broken mussel shells.

  A young man and woman strolled by arm in arm. “Is she yours?” the woman asked Lizzie. She’d seen how Lizzie watched Jenny.

  “No,” said Lizzie. Too quickly. “No. She’s an orphan.”

  “How sad,” said the man. “Such a sweet little girl.”

  Close to the waterline the tide had carved a tunnel through the rocky cliffs. This inspired the boys into pirate games. They’d forced the girls inside and were devising tortures, when Miss Stevens caught on and set the prisoners free. Lizzie saw her emerge, a boy’s ear in each of her hands.

  Miss Stevens called the children together. “Which is strongest, air, water, or stone?” she asked them. The gulls screamed themselves hoarse.

  The children returned to the Ark, tired and chapped from the sun and wind. Their clothes were scratchy with salt and sand; the ocean continued to boom distantly in their ears. Jenny had a coiled hermit-crab shell clutched in her fist. She brought it near her face to see how far down into the ink of the coil she could see. She wondered if there was anyone hidden inside. Her fingers smelled of seaweed. She breathed the odor in again and again.

  When she went to put the shell into her wardrobe—a box that apples had once arrived in—Maud Curry was sitting on her bed, waiting. “What have you got?” she demanded. “Give it to me. And go wash your hands and smooth your hair. No wonder no one adopts you. You smell.”

  ONE

  Lizzie went straight from her day at the beach to Mrs. Putnam’s Wednesday at-home. She cleaned up in the Putnams’ bathroom and joined the ladies in the conservatory. Everything was as it should be. Erma had returned to Sacramento with the children—Lizzie was so lucky not to have children! Erma had aged ten years for every child—the sun was shining, the biscuits had raspberry jam fillings, and Mrs. Mullin took the seat under the fern.

  A tall vase near Lizzie was stuffed with fresh-cut branches of lilac. They smelled wonderful. Mrs. Putnam had dressed in a harmonious plum. She took her usual chair and told Lizzie she’d met a family whose daughter went to the Sacred Heart Convent in Oakland. This was the same school Marie Bell attended. The prohibition on seeing Mrs. Pleasant apparently would never dampen Mrs. Putnam’s need to discuss her.

  Mrs. Putnam had learnt that Marie was a taciturn child, but that, in itself, spoke volumes. She was often visited by Mrs. Pleasant, but never by her father or mother. Mrs. Pleasant was also thought to have chosen the school, since she was a practicing Catholic and the Bells were not, though Mrs. Pleasant did occasionally appear also on the donors’ list at the African Methodist Episcopal church. Say what you would, that woman took care of her own.

  Marie was a pale, plump girl with hair like straw and cheeks like strawberries. “Not the beauty her mother was, I’m told,” said Mrs. Putnam, “but that might be all to the good.” Beauty was perilous to girls just as often as it was advantageous, and while Mrs. Putnam was not one who liked to pass judgment, it must be remembered that Marie did not have the sort of mother who could guide her to respectability.

  Poor Marie was not even lively. “Everyone who knows her can tell,” Mrs. Putnam informed Lizzie, “that something is terribly wrong in that house.” Meanwhile, she had it on good authority that Fred Bell, the oldest boy, had been sent to military school in the East, but he’d run off with a dancer, or else he’d been expelled for setting a fire. Either way, it was awful, and he was back in San Francisco, but not at the House of Mystery, as his father refused to speak to him.

  “There was some testimony about the Bell children during the Sharon trial,” Lizzie said. “But I can’t quite remember it.”

  “Oh, I paid no attention to the Sharon trial,” Mrs. Putnam said. “No one I know did.”

  “A degrading business. It reflected so poorly on the city. Why can’t the papers publish the nice things people do?” Behind Mrs. Mullin, the fern was a fountain of green feathers rising from her head like the war bonnet of an Indian. “And the way they persisted in printing every sordid detail! As if decent people cared to read such things!”

  On the street outside, a man was shouting at his horse or his wife. Mrs. Putnam put down her tea and moved to close the window. She stood between the dotted-muslin curtains in a dazzling cone of sunlight so that Lizzie could hardly see her. This gave her voice an oracular authority. “It was when Mr. Bell was called to the stand,” she said. “This was during the first trial. Five, six years ago. Sharon’s lawyer—”

  “William Barnes, it was then,” Mrs. Mullin offered helpfully.

  “Mr. Barnes said that one of the Bell twins was actually the daughter of a German Jew working at the Palace as a maid—”

  “Until she became the Bell twins’ wet nurse.”

  “She was not a married woman. She gave her baby to Mrs. Pleasant, who promised to find a loving family. But then, Barnes said, Mammy Pleasant palmed Bertha’s baby off on Thomas Bell and let Bertha nurse her right in the Bell home. Tricked that old coot into thinking he was the proud father of twins.”

  “Mrs. Pleasant denied every jot of it, but she refused to say where Bertha’s baby had gone. The Bells sued the Alta just for publishing the testimony. They said it was libel to the family—”

  “Until they dropped the suit,” Mrs. Mullin noted. “They didn’t want a lot of lawyers poking around the House of Mystery!”

  Lizzie remembered it now. “How old would that baby be?” she asked, even though she knew the answer would be too old. Jenny could certainly be Jewish, with her dark hair and dark eyes.

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t know, dear. Seven or eight, I suppose.” Mrs. Putnam returned to her seat so that her voice came again from her mouth and not from a pillar of fire. Inevitably her credibility suffered. “It was Mr. Barnes’s contention that Mrs. Pleasant manufactured the whole case against Sharon. Paid every witness. Forged the wedding contract. Coached poor, dim Allie. Hoodwinked Mr. Bell along with everyone else.”

  “She doesn’t feel about family the way we do. No colored perso
n cares about blood.”

  “How could they?” Mrs. Putnam asked. “In all fairness, it’s a matter of history, not race. Sold away from your mother and denied by your father. A white man, let’s face that fact. That’s why she does that baby-farming, shuffling children into any old family. Why should she care who belongs to whom? Whoever cared for her?” She paused a moment, shaking her head from the pity of it.

  “They do say one of the Bell children is colored.” Mrs. Mullin’s eyes were big and round, and she blinked them slowly. “But no one knows which.”

  And Lizzie went on saying nothing. She didn’t, as was customary, pay with stories of her own. She told no one about the red bedroom, the nursery with its staring dolls, or the murder of Malina Paillet, much as they would have loved it. She didn’t mention Jenny Ijub or Mr. Finney’s preposterous accusations, much as they would have hated it. She wasn’t even sure why she kept silent. In spite of her protestations, her interest in the Bell family had become proprietary; her position, implicated. Listening to these stories made Lizzie feel guilty.

  Something had begun to nag at her, something she’d remembered only just now, just here in the Putnams’ house. She turned it over and over in her mind, tried to worry or argue it away. It kept resurfacing. Wood floating on water. Lizzie’s imagination was tougher than she was, exactly as her mother had always contended.

  Blythe came in and Lizzie watched her collect the tea things. The cups were British, gold handles and tiny blue forget-me-nots. The pot was from China, very fat and painted white with blue willow trees, temples, and doves. The tea inside was a black Ceylon. “How are the boys, Blythe?” Lizzie said, forgetting she had already asked.

  “I’ve no complaints,” Blythe answered.