While the nursemaid’s still blinking at her, Blanche shoves past her and opens the door.
So dark—that’s what strikes her first, even more than the hot distillation of the stink. Her eyes fight to make sense of the shapes. Crib after metal crib, littered with small limbs … “Christ, open the shutters.”
“That’ll only let more heat in,” the girl protests.
Blanche fumbles her way to the window, forces her skirt between two cribs.
“Which is yours?”
Instead of answering, Blanche grabs a handle and winches till light slants across the room. Weak goatish cries go up. Two small ones in one crib, three in the next … Tear-shaped glass bottles in mouths, or gone crusty on chests, or lost in corners with their black rubber teats dribbling onto the sheets. Every baby is tangled in the same size garment, once white. Eyes closed, or blinking wetly, or open and vacant. All, big and small, strangely inanimate; with a sensation like a blow to her chest, Blanche finally recognizes the tribe her son belongs to.
One black face, one or two infants who could be Indians, but most of them pallid. Pinching her nose to shut out the smell, her eyes sliding from crib to crib. She can’t see P’tit anywhere.
The foot of a facedown sleeper flickers and curls, and with a pounding relief Blanche spots the soft sole and seizes it, then scoops up her son. He seems so much bigger since she saw him last, and she presses kisses all over his howling face …
“I said, that one’s a girl.”
Blanche is scarlet. Deposits the stranger child back in her crib, wipes the foreign tears off her own mouth.
“Upset her, so you did, picking her up that way,” complains the nursemaid.
“Are you telling me they lie here all day in their own dirt with nobody picking them up?” roars Blanche, her eyes scanning the shadowy corners of the room.
“I do what I can.”
But Blanche’s not listening because she’s recognized P’tit at last, in the end crib. She approaches cautiously, in case he turns into another changeling. But no, that’s him, lying on his side, gigantic eyes sunken above patches of hot red skin. Watching her through the bars, as if she’s a wild beast. A bulging forehead, but Arthur’s pencil-thin eyebrows arching across it: How could Blanche not have known her baby?
He’s chewing on something mushroom-shaped. Blanche holds out her hands to him with an attempt at a smile, but he doesn’t stir.
She lifts P’tit carefully. His small garment is limp with sweat. He lets out a sob. Then a convulsive cough, and Blanche feels such pity that she presses him to her. Registers a surge of warmth against her bodice. Love, she thinks in shock, love flaring up between herself and this sobbing baby, love so hot she can feel it on her skin. Then the heat dies away and she realizes what it is: he’s pissed on her.
The girl’s moving from crib to crib slotting bottles back into mouths.
Blanche can’t bear this room a minute longer. She’s tempted to set down the wailing, sopping bundle that is P’tit exactly where she found him. But of course she won’t; she can’t; she could never do that, now she knows what it’s like here, and look herself in the face. So she pulls him onto her hip and makes for the passage.
“The shirt, if you please.” The girl’s too close to her.
“What are you talking about?” shouts Blanche over the baby’s cries.
“I need the nightshirt back.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Any parent that—‘own clothing to be provided on departure,’ see,” says the girl, with the rapid delivery of a memorized lesson, “because it’s the doctress’s property, she’s particular about it.”
For a moment Blanche is tempted to pull the sodden rag over P’tit’s head and throw it in the girl’s face. Instead, she steps away.
But the girl clings to P’tit’s hem. “The shirt or its value,” she pleads, “or the doctress’ll dock me.”
“Here’s its value.” Blanche spits on the floor.
The girl’s grip has shifted to P’tit’s tiny foot.
“Take your hands off my son.” Blanche yanks him away. P’tit is still weeping as his reddened mouth fastens onto the black thing in his fist, and he twists away from Blanche as best he can.
A mutter: “Reckon he knows my hands better than yours.”
The truth of that fills Blanche with a wild fury, and her fist is coming around to club the girl to the floor—but then she hears a sound. It’s a tiny one, and it catches Blanche’s attention only because it’s coming from the wrong room. Not from the room she just walked out of, where a couple of the babies are whining now, but from behind the door on the left. She listens hard; the sound’s gone. Perhaps she imagined it. “What’s in there?”
The nursemaid’s face tightens.
“You’ve got more?” Blanche asks, incredulous.
The girl says something that sounds to Blanche like “Yours is a weakly,” but that makes no sense. A weakling, is that what the girl means?
“He’s a what?” Blanche asks.
“You pay by the week, see? So yours is a weekly,” the nursemaid says, pointing at P’tit, whose sobs have calmed to little moans. “Through there …” She jerks her head toward the room on the left. “We call them the paid-ups because they’re all paid up. A lump sum, paid in full at the start. You get me?”
Black spots float past Blanche’s eyes and she thinks she might fall. She seizes the handle of the door on the left.
The girl’s hand locks over hers.
How many will she find stacked in each crib, alive in name only, sucking on, what—milk diluted down to cloudy water? Glazed-eyed and crone-faced, tiny bones showing through translucent skin? Nobody’s coming back for the paid-ups. It’s not that Blanche wants to open this door; she’s never wanted anything less. But she must. Somebody must.
Blanche is beginning to twist the knob, despite the girl’s resistance. She’s going in. That’s what she’ll always tell herself afterward—she’s on the very point of marching in there and hurling the shutters open, letting in the remorseless light, when P’tit bursts out coughing. The patches on his cheek, as rough as split wood, flare up as if burning. He whoops wetly, writhes and flails on Blanche’s hip, almost slips to the floor. Is that what her son wants most, to get away from her? Well, damn his ungrateful little hide. She lets go of the door handle and locks both arms around him.
The girl swerves across the hall and opens the front door for Blanche. “Keep the shirt,” she gabbles, gesturing as if to shoo the pair of them out. “I’ll tell Doctress Hoffman the laundry lost it.”
“This place—” says Blanche, as if her tongue’s made of iron. “Tell your doctress she could be had up on charges.”
Before she knows it, she’s on the step, and the door’s thudded shut behind her.
But are there in fact any charges? Blanche doesn’t know that a baby has what you’d call a right to anything. And what can she tell the police if she rushes off to report this doctress, and they ask how carefully Blanche inspected the house on Folsom Street before leaving her infant there for, what, more than eleven months? Oh no, you see, she’ll have to say, I left all the arrangements to my madam …
At least she’s out of that awful place; she and P’tit both are. Exhilaration pulses through her.
His coughing suddenly cuts off.
Blanche gives him a look to check if he’s breathing. His eyes are squeezed tight against the daylight. Now she can see that his skin is corpse-pale. A humid rash all around his mouth, where he sucks on that black object—which turns out to be an old doorknob. What a thing to chew on! P’tit lets out a hiccup, and for a moment he resembles nothing so much as a little old dipso.
Blanche almost laughs. She’ll rise above the fact that her white silk bodice is patchy with urine. She puts her son’s face close to hers. Plants a kiss on his forehead, just one soft little bisou, the kind she’s often seen mothers dropping on their babies’ heads.
He howls as if her touch is poi
sonous.
“All right, no bisous,” she snaps.
Then, on a hunch, she turns P’tit halfway around so he’s looking at the street, and he calms at once.
In the cab, the baby shies away from the air blowing in his face, so Blanche has to slide the window shut, which makes the cab stifling. Looking through the smeary glass, she describes the City for him, pointing at every oyster stall and cement wagon. P’tit blinks, expressionless; it occurs to her to wonder how far babies can see. He seems most interested in the doorknob he’s clutching. When Blanche tries to pry it out of his slippery fingers, he lashes out, cracking her on the eye.
“Bordel!” The pain is startling.
Her mother would have smacked him right back, to teach him. But Blanche’s hand falters. If the tiny fellow wants to hold on to the one plaything he’s used to, who is she to take it away?
There’s a Chinese funeral trailing by on Sacramento—drums and gongs pounding, firecrackers going off, dozens of white-robed keeners, enough fuss that it must be for a man, and probably an elderly one. Blanche gets out of the cab outside number 815 with P’tit in her arms, and on an impulse she steps forward to show him the cab horse, putting them face to face. Might her son grow up to have her talent for riding? “Regarde le beau cheval.” And then, correcting herself, because P’tit will have to be an American: “Nice horsey.”
The tired animal blows out through his nostrils and P’tit bursts into shrieks of fright.
Blanche clutches his lashing limbs. “Chut, chut,” she hushes him. “Home to Papa now.” Looking up at the second floor.
Where’s Arthur when Blanche needs him most?
For what feels like hours, she’s been carrying the whimpering baby through the empty apartment. Either with him facing out, her arm like a belt tying him to her, or with him facing in, but hoisted high enough on her ribs that he can lean over her shoulder. The important thing, it seems, is for P’tit not to be confronted with his mother’s face. Any attempt at a cuddle horrifies him.
Blanche feels insulted by this, but the undertow of guilt keeps her going, pacing through the airless rooms. How could she and Arthur have left their son in that hellhole on Folsom Street for a day, let alone most of a year? But we didn’t know. Why didn’t they know? Madame never told us. Nobody told us. But why didn’t they ask?
Jenny Bonnet’s the only one who thought to put the obvious questions. A virtual stranger; an interfering jailbird. If Jenny knocked on the door just then, Blanche would have trouble deciding whether to thank her or throw something at her.
Well. P’tit is here: that’s a fact. What Blanche is going to do with him tomorrow she doesn’t know, but right now she’s going to strip him down to his knotted diaper to cool him so he’ll stop sniveling for a moment and she’ll be able to think.
Even after he’s bare, his mottled skin boils with heat. Searching among all the scaly patches, Blanche can’t find anything like a fresh scab on either arm to suggest that Frau Hoffman bothered to have the babies vaccinated. She throws the awful nightshirt in the ashy stove so she can burn it tonight, once the evening’s cooled enough for her to be able to bear a little fire. The smell of P’tit clouds around her, as rank as the cat cages at the Cirque d’Hiver. And her bodice, her new white bodice, is yellow with piss. The two of them need a bath, above all things, but there’s no Gudrun to tote the water from the faucet in the downstairs hall. When Blanche hauled the baby up four flights of stairs to knock on the attic door a while ago, there was no answer. (Where could the girl be gone to all Sunday? Some endless Lutheran service?)
“Enough walking?” she murmurs to P’tit now. “Care to lie down?”
She puts him down warily, like he’s a bomb that might go off, on his back in the middle of her and Arthur’s bedspread. Then withdraws, so he won’t be appalled by her looming face. P’tit mouths his doorknob and coughs as if it’s choking him. Peers at the wall. With one claw he scratches a purple patch where his sparse hair meets his neck.
From this distance Blanche registers that her son is not shaped like any baby she’s ever seen. It’s not just his forehead, which swells like a turnip, something you might dig out of the dirt. His ankles are distinctly thicker than his bowed legs, his wrists thicker than his arms, and his breastbone pushes out, as sharp as the prow of a ship. She doesn’t remember him looking like this when he was born. And Blanche has never noticed any of these oddities on visits, but then, P’tit was always wrapped in white linen from head to toe, wasn’t he? Cap, bib, gown, little mittens and stockings … To mask the smell, Blanche thinks bitterly. To mask everything that wasn’t right.
She can’t look anymore; she turns her back to him. She must get out of this room and wash herself, put on a clean bodice at least. But P’tit’s not safe on the bed because babies roll off beds, don’t they? She doesn’t know much about infants other than a few ways they can die. Mind you, P’tit doesn’t seem able to roll. He doesn’t seem able to do anything. What’s wrong with him?
P’tit lets out a loud fart, which makes him cry. He blinks at the big windows, the excess of light, the yelps of the wheeling gulls.
Blanche casts around for something to put him in, because that’s what you do with a baby. Her apartment seems changed, inhospitable. It doesn’t have anything this terrible visitor needs.
The trunks she and Arthur brought from Paris! She hesitates, then starts to empty one of her own, because her lover will have a fit if she scatters his clothes. (And what’ll he say about her bringing P’tit back here without a word of warning?) She piles her skirts and chemises on the nearest rush chair. P’tit wails on, the blank lament of someone who doesn’t expect any remedy. Now she’s down to the yellowed paper lining of the trunk—but that’s too bare, the baby will bash his head on the hard staves. Blanche finds a blanket in a closet, then another, and does her best to pad the trunk with them before she puts a sheet down. It still looks too big, but that’s better than too small, surely? On Folsom Street he had only a fraction of this space—no, Blanche is not going to think about the so-called farm of Doctress Hoffman’s, because it makes her shake in a way she didn’t while she was standing there quarreling with the nursemaid. She’s going to bed P’tit down in this trunk if only he’ll stop that mewing.
There. Ready. She picks P’tit up, swiveling him to face away from her. His crying wanes. She carries him over to the trunk—but what if putting him down in it prompts another outburst? Maybe better to wait till his mood has turned. Besides, he’ll spread his terrible reek all over the sheet. It occurs to her that she shouldn’t have put him on her bedspread, for that same reason.
Only when her own stomach lets out a loud rumble does Blanche stop to think that P’tit might be hungry. Infants eat often, don’t they? She totes him over to look in the icebox. No milk, just scum in the jar. What the hell is she to feed the creature?
In the cupboard Blanche finds half a baguette. “Voilà! There you go.” But P’tit doesn’t seem to recognize it as food. She puts a chunk between his fingers. He puzzles over it for a long moment, then lets it drop to the floorboards.
She picks it up and presses it back into his small hand. Guides it to his lips—but he shrinks away.
Any normal child would gum the thing, surely? She looks into his mouth to check there’s no blockage. Pulls up his puckered upper lip, though it makes him pant with fright. A year old and not a single tooth. Unless P’tit’s worn them all away on his nasty doorknob? No, not even a stub. He’s like a one-year-old newborn. A baby who’ll never grow up—is that possible? A baby who’ll stay this way, a perpetual living reproach to her?
Panic, beating Blanche’s ribs like a drum. She needs a drink.
She ransacks the cupboard till she finds the wine they opened at lunch. Awkwardly, one-handed, she uncorks it with her teeth and pours herself a big glass.
Babies shouldn’t drink wine, should they? It occurs to her to offer P’tit some water instead. She fills a cup from the jug. P’tit lets her move the sli
ck doorknob away a few inches and press the cup to his mouth, but he seems to have no idea what to do; the liquid runs down his neck and pools in the little hollow at the base of his throat.
Surely Blanche can lay him down for a minute, just to change her clothes? She tries it, spreading yesterday’s San Francisco Examiner across the middle of the sofa in the salon and putting him flat on it.
P’tit contracts as if in pain, face and feet drawing together, making the paper crinkle. It occurs to Blanche that he’s trying to sit. She scoops him into an upright position, although his tiny limbs are oddly resistant. Props him, with a cushion, against the back of the sofa. There’s something unconvincing about his pose, something out of plumb. He’s a mismade rag doll. Every so often he shakes his head as if saying a querulous no to some unvoiced question.
“We’ve got to go out,” Blanche tells him, speaking aloud to cut the silence. He needs diapers, clothes, a bottle, milk … but it’s impossible, because she can’t bear the thought of going back out into the scalding day lugging him with her. Not that such a tiny boy can weigh more than a cat, but he’s awkward to handle because she’s not used to it. She can’t go out, can’t have a bath, can’t do anything but sit here staring at the ugliest, saddest baby in the world.
Self-pity brims behind her eyes. Blanche fills up her glass again and has a few bites of stale baguette so she won’t get dizzy. Reaches down and cracks her silk bodice open, pulls it off. She can’t imagine ever wearing the nasty thing again.
After wrenching her sweaty chemise over her head in the bedroom, Blanche pours out a little water and scrubs herself to get that unclean feeling off. No sound from the salon.
P’tit needs a wash too, needs it worse than she does. She makes herself walk into the next room. He hasn’t stirred. He’s giving the wall an accusing stare.
Blanche picks him up and brings him back to the bedroom, sits him awkwardly on the edge of her bed. She wipes him down, flinching whenever she touches one of the rough patches in the crooks of his arms or in his leg creases. P’tit doesn’t flinch, or cry. She tugs the diaper’s knots open with some difficulty and lets the cloth slip off. It seems almost heavier than the baby, caked with brown. How often did that crew on Folsom bother to wash the babies? Blanche finds she must place P’tit right in the basin to soak the hard stuff off his tiny wrinkled bag and to wash in between his shrunken buttocks. Has she got it all? A smear on the bedspread: merde! She scrubs at it with another rag, widening the faint brown circle.
Frog Music Page 10
