Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  So she says nothing, does nothing but carry on doing what she does best as Arthur starts to groan. Isn’t she his, hasn’t she always been Arthur’s? And what’s Arthur’s is Ernest’s, because that’s the kind of man Arthur is: generous to a fault. He’s never cared about the stupid michetons who lavish their cash on Blanche, and in return she doesn’t care—well, doesn’t much care—about other women. The possibility of other women, that is, because she doesn’t know of any in particular. But a man so handsome—there must occasionally be other women, no? Arthur would never rub her face in it. He has manners. It’s all part and parcel of being a free spirit, because if love isn’t free, then, as Arthur says, it’s just goddamn marriage without the name.

  Ernest is a watcher; sometimes that’s all he requires. But not today. When Blanche feels the younger man’s fingers sliding the nightgown up over her hips, does she mind? That’s the curious thing: sometimes you object and sometimes you don’t and sometimes you crave it so much it makes you sick. Right now, for instance, Blanche can’t tell whether she wants Arthur’s friend. Their friend, she supposes, though never exactly her friend. Ernest is an ape below the line on his neck where his razor stops—one black swoop from shoulders to shins. The pelt ages him, so no one would guess he’s only twenty-one. Blanche can’t see him right now, can’t see anything but the pale swoop of Arthur’s belly, a little softer than it used to be when he was young. She mustn’t get pregnant again, she really mustn’t. Her little box of carbolic plugs in the bureau. “Wait,” she says, “I ain’t—”

  “Prends-la dans le cul,” he murmurs to Ernest, playing her nipples the way he might the strings of a guitar.

  So Ernest does. It blurs Blanche’s senses, the gentleness on her breasts and the hard insistence at her ass. Confusion swindles her into sensation. Qu’importe; whether or not she wants Arthur and Ernest to take her at both ends hardly matters at this point. The trampling on her will rather excites her; her body likes having its mind made up for it. So she gasps, letting Ernest in.

  The rhythmic friction between desire and disgust; Blanche knows that from the little stage at the House of Mirrors where she doles it out Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Right now she’s panting and aching, her jaw crammed to bursting with Arthur’s hot girth, her wrists taking her weight as Ernest speeds up the terrible pressure deep inside her, but she knows there is in fact no limit to what she can take. Blanche is the conduit, the river, the rope, the electrical current. They’re fucking right through her, the smooth man and the hairy man, and she’s going to drink down every drop they’ve got, their spill one unbroken seam of gold through the shattering rock.

  III

  THERE’S THE CITY

  Sunday’s payday at the House of Mirrors, so Blanche strolls down the block to the bordel that afternoon in mid-August. A new red-and-white costume, but no jewelry, because she’s always dressed so eye-catchingly that she needs none. Arthur’s the magpie of the two of them, his fob always thick with baubles; like most men of the sporting set, he prefers to wear his gold.

  She pauses to listen to a harpist pluck out a serenade. Her right leg is aching from last night’s collision with Jenny Bonnet’s high-wheeler, and the rest of her still throbs in a better way from what she and Arthur and Ernest got up to this morning.

  Parasols and umbrellas form a flotilla along Sacramento Street, silk shields held up against the merciless flood of light. A general air of dishevelment, businessmen in shirtsleeves, women half bare and mopping at themselves with handkerchiefs. Every store Blanche passes is crammed with loiterers who’ll stay in there as long as the shop boys will let them; every bar filled with whoever can afford a drink an hour.

  Madame Johanna’s Italianate mansion is angel blue, with snowy paintwork; the epitome of taste. The porter’s muscle-bound in his cyan livery. He’s said to be Dutch, though Blanche has never heard a word out of him, nor out of the black maid who brings her downstairs to Madame’s private parlor. Blanche once teased Madame about hiring mutes, but Madame told her that all of the servants came fully equipped; they just knew how to hold their tongues.

  The parlor walls are a muted lavender. This could be a visiting room in a well-endowed convent instead of the City’s most notorious brothel. Bookcases bulwark the walls, heavy with volumes in German, French, English. The carpet is primly patterned with lozenges—so unlike the red-tufted extravaganza in the Grand Saloon upstairs. Blanche can hear the Professor there now, practicing a crowd-pleaser at top speed, with too much pedal.

  The proprietor sits at her desk, in ashy silk as always, with colorless hair as sleek as plaster; she could be any age at all. Madame holds up one finger to make Blanche wait. “‘Reduced rates for parties from out of town,’” she murmurs, finishing her copperplate-script sentence, then lifting the page to check the carbon paper.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to get up your circulars on a typewriter?” Blanche wonders.

  “Ah, but our visitors appreciate the personal touch.” Madame sets down her pen, lets her little glasses drop on their gold chain, and stands up to kiss Blanche lightly on both cheeks. “Who’d have thought this business would require so much paperwork?”

  Blanche picks up a cabinet card from a stack of photographs beside the envelopes: a girl with heavily kohled eyes, bare limbs sliding out of Moorish draperies. “Sal’s too skinny for Eastern,” she comments. “Those matchstick legs!”

  “She’s got a notion to try a number with fringed tights and a hat in the shape of a horse’s head,” mentions Madame.

  Blanche cackles. She chooses an overstuffed chair. She thinks back to her eight years at the Cirque d’Hiver: at least there the horses were real, even if the pay was much lower than what she makes at the House of Mirrors.

  “Well, variety’s the main thing. Though Madame Bertha is still stuffing all her girls into frilly white nightgowns,” Madame Johanna adds, jerking her head contemptuously in the direction of the rival brothel down the street, “presumably to disguise the fact that half of them are over twenty.”

  Is that a jibe at Blanche’s age? She counterattacks: “Have you any auctions coming up?”

  “Oh yes,” says Madame, pretending not to register the barbed tone, and she reads from her circular:

  The House of Mirrors is celebrated not only for the range of delights on offer but for their utmost freshness, notably on the first Friday of every month.

  “Does it ever stick in your craw?” asks Blanche.

  Madame’s gaze is saintly. “Just because bidders may fancy that a girl is nine years old does not mean that’s the case.”

  Blanche grimaces, picturing Madame’s supplier; she’s met the man only once, in a corridor upstairs, but that was enough to give her the creeps. “It doesn’t mean she’s fourteen either.”

  “Since to consent—legally—she must be ten, logically she must be that, at least.”

  “Logically! Anyhow, I bet your fellow’s notion of consent is a little bottle of laudanum,” says Blanche.

  The Prussian shrugs her shoulders as if they’re stiff. “Well. You wouldn’t deny a girl her one chance to make a real killing? The fortunes some fools will throw down to stake a first claim, or to delude themselves that’s what they’re doing … The virgin trade should really be considered a way of milking money from mugs, rather like the forms of speculation on which the loafers of California spend their all. Or their lady friends’ all, of course.”

  Blanche leans back in the chair and smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever come to pick up my wages without your managing to get in some dig at my fancy man.”

  “True,” says Madame, “I’ve never quite grasped the point of Deneve. Talented on the trapeze once—I’ll take your word for that—but what can he do on the ground?”

  The funny thing is, Arthur calls Madame the splendid Prussian; he has no idea that she holds him in contempt. “He did bring me here,” Blanche observes.

  Meaning to America, but to the House of Mirrors too. Arthur brought her
, watched, clapped the loudest. After a few weeks, it hadn’t seemed to Blanche so very much of a step to go from dancing to sitting in the laps of the richer customers, and from that to letting one take her to a hotel for five times what she earned from a leg show. Arthur had been so encouraging. Blanche was pregnant and in what he teasingly called an overheated state. The michetons didn’t object as her belly rounded; quite the contrary. It seemed to give some of them a perverse thrill.

  “A stinking ship brought you here too,” murmurs Madame,” but you managed to walk away from that promptly. Strange how girls of other nationalities don’t seem to need these hangers-on. If they have pimps, the fellows take managerial roles, at least, whereas these French macs are the feeblest parasites.”

  Blanche only smiles. Parasite? For almost a decade, Arthur’s been the soil she’s rooted in, the rock she grips, the water that revives her. What would this widow know about men and women in the real world, outside her little puppet theater of performers and watchers?

  There’s no information to be had about the late Mr. Werner, so the parlor girls who live upstairs speculate that Madame Johanna poisoned him. She’s never been seen with anyone who could plausibly be a lover, so they joke that her chatte must have sealed up by now, the way an old wound scars over.

  “Why keep one sponger, my dear,” Madame presses on, “when so many men pant at the prospect of keeping you? L’amant de Blanche, to name but one …”

  Lamantia is the man’s real name, and his punning pseudonym for himself—L’amant de Blanche, “the lover of Blanche”—sets her teeth on edge. The Sicilian businessman, partner in a large concern on Market Street, insists on using the assumed name when he hires Blanche—as if spending a night with a showgirl is a cloak-and-dagger business! “For the last time,” Blanche snaps, “I don’t want a keeper.”

  “But you have so very many friends to choose from, you could follow your whim …”

  She can’t stand that euphemism for michetons either—friends, as if what she exchanges with these various merchants, railroad magnates, and other plutocrats bears any resemblance to friendship. “My whim has always been Arthur.”

  “Well.” Madame throws up her bony hands. “You must be making a comfortable living from your rents in addition to what you earn here, if you can afford to keep such a pet.”

  Blanche smooths her scarlet skirt instead of answering. She wishes she’d never boasted to Madame about buying number 815 in the first place. The woman makes a habit of knowing too much and using it.

  “Two pets, rather, if we count Ernest Girard—a matched pair of pugs,” says Madame amusedly. “I imagine they take a great deal of feeding and grooming …”

  This reminds Blanche, uncomfortably, of P’tit and of her new acquaintance’s digging for information about him last night. To get Madame off the subject of keepers, she says, “By the way, these Hoffmans who’re minding our P’tit Arthur …” Then she realizes she doesn’t know how to phrase the question. “Is it far enough outside the City to be safe, would you say? Is the air”—Blanche strains for the word—“salubrious?” It occurs to her only now that while she, Arthur, and Ernest all got their scratches the last time the smallpox hit Paris, the same isn’t true of P’tit. “No doubt they’ve vaccinated the babies.”

  “No doubt.”

  Blanche tries again. “Have the Hoffmans quite a few little ones in their care?”

  The Prussian is looking into her cash box now; she licks a finger to count a stack of notes. “Children have such a relish for company, don’t they?”

  Was that an answer? “Perhaps I should pay him a visit there,” Blanche says tentatively.

  The widow purses her pale lips.

  “I know it’s not our usual procedure, but these aren’t ordinary times.”

  Madame Johanna shakes her head. “Frau Hoffman finds that parents disrupt the routines.”

  Blanche bristles. Routines—that makes the place sound more like a school or a hospital than a home for babies. How many infants could there be, lodging with one family of farmers? Blanche supposes she should have looked into these details before, but at the end of each visit, she’s always been grateful to wave good-bye as the nurse totes her small burden away in his basket.

  One of these days, of course, P’tit will be grown enough that everything will be different. He’ll sit up, or stand, finally stretch out his arms to Maman, ready to be carried back to Sacramento Street to see his Papa, and perhaps even to stay, when the time is right. “I’m just a touch anxious, because of the heat and the epidemic,” she tells Madame now.

  “Naturally. But your little one’s very well.”

  “How do you—”

  “Frau Hoffman would have informed me if the case were otherwise.”

  This is where Blanche should accept her hundred in worn notes, pull on her lace gloves, pick up her parasol, and say her merci. But there’s something veiled in the madam’s tone … “Where do they live, exactly?” asks Blanche.

  A hiss of breath. “If you’re irrational enough to insist on putting the child at greater risk in order to set your mind at rest, I’ll have him brought here this very afternoon.”

  “I just find it a little odd that you don’t seem to want me to see this farm.”

  An elegant shrug of the silk-covered shoulders. “You’re a free woman. But I find it equally odd,” adds Madame with an implacable smile, “that you’re suddenly so curious after almost a year.”

  Blanche is on her feet, knuckles on the carved bureau. “What’s the damn address?”

  Madame Johanna seems to be weighing something. “Folsom,” she says at last.

  Blanche has never heard of a village by that name. She stares. “Folsom Street?” That’s right downtown, in the Mission. She’s probably gone past the door a hundred times.

  “I wonder how you picked up the impression it was outside the City?”

  “You’ve always called it a farm. Whereabouts on Folsom?” demands Blanche.

  “Sit down.” Madame sighs. “You’ve proved your point: underneath that famously snowy décolletage beats a mother’s heart. I’ll send for him this minute, if you like.”

  Blanche sees red. “What number on Folsom?”

  “Fourteen twenty-two.”

  Blanche strides toward the door, then turns back to snatch her parasol and gloves.

  “I always thought we understood each other,” murmurs Madame.

  That August afternoon the air’s unbearable, chalky with dust. The harpist is still on his stool outside the House of Mirrors but struggling with a tune from some Verdi opera now. Squinting out from under the pinked edge of her ivory parasol, Blanche waits impatiently for a horsecar—but when it comes, there’s a boy hanging off the back whose pocks look moist. What’s he doing out of bed? Blanche shudders and turns away, looking for a cab instead. Realizing, only now, that she dashed off without getting her wages from Madame, as impulsive as some green girl.

  The cabbie spots her wave and brakes at the last moment, so the sweating horse almost tramples her. The man doesn’t bother getting down. “Fourteen twenty-two Folsom,” Blanche calls up to him, climbing into the little carriage. She slams the door shut herself.

  They pass a crumpled brown shape in the street being winched into a cart: the third dead horse Blanche has seen this week. In the endless heat, the hills of the City are breaking the poor hacks; no circus pony she had the handling of ever endured so much. Blanche wishes this driver would slow down before his own wild-eyed bay drops in the traces. A knot of Specials at one corner are jawing and smoking pipes rather than engaging in any law enforcement. The streets are emptier than usual, she notices, but the vast white pavilion built for the Industrial Exhibition in this national centennial year is still pulling in the crowds. Maybe folks just want to be out of the sun, even if it means they risk rubbing up against the sick.

  The cab turns down Tenth Street, into the Mission, and the variety of pale faces strikes her: Italians, Irish, Prussians, a
ll living cheek by jowl. Blanche rather dreads reaching her destination. Under what conditions has her son been living? If these Hoffmans aren’t farmers, what are they?

  She spots a swarm of kids kneeling around an ice block that’s fallen from a cart, still bristling with straw. They’re all licking it. Children are said to be the most susceptible to infection. How could this neighborhood be any healthier for babies than Chinatown? Blanche was misled from the start. Goddamn Madame Johanna and her Prussian friends.

  Number 1422 turns out to be next door to a Chinese laundry that sends coils of smoke in all directions. It’s a wary adolescent who answers the door, not the uniformed nurse who brings P’tit to the House of Mirrors for his visits. “Doctress has just stepped out,” she mutters.

  Blanche is hit by the eye-watering reek of shit. “Who’s this doctress?”

  “Doctress Hoffman, she just stepped out. Wish to leave a message? What name?”

  Blanche has been steeling her nerves, half expecting bedlam—babies shrieking—but this silence is worse. “Where do you keep the infants?”

  The nursemaid’s eyes flicker. “Doctress is—”

  “Just stepped out, yes, but what I want to know is, where’s my son?”

  “What name?”

  “Beunon. I mean, Deneve.” Blanche pushes past the rigid girl and tries the first door on the right. It opens.

  “Not—that’s for appointments,” says the girl. She yanks the knob and shuts the door again, but not before Blanche catches a glimpse of a narrow bed, a sink, and a rack of instruments and realizes what appointments must mean.

  The girl has more grit than one would expect; she takes her stand between Blanche and the second door, her arms out. “They’re having their nap.”

  Blanche’s pulse is hammering in her throat. “I pay eight dollars a week for his care and lodging, and I believe I have the right to see—”