Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  “Fires, too, every couple years. When our ship came in, in ‘51, the whole place was up in flames. Streets charring, fir planks curling up like snakes …”

  “You make it sound like the time of your life,” Blanche objects.

  Jenny dances from foot to foot. “Don’t everyone crave a little zest to make one day different from the last?”

  “Not that much zest,” says Blanche. Thinking: I liked my days the way they were, before everything changed. After a minute, she asks, “Have you ever roamed farther afield?”

  “Not too far yet,” admits Jenny with a touch of sheepishness. “Been to Sacramento once, though it was knee-deep in water at the time.”

  “That would suit a swamp-wader like you,” jokes Blanche, letting P’tit slide down to her hip.

  “‘Course, now that it’s the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, I hear Sacramento’s getting aspirations. They’re bringing Chinese in to build up the levees, filling in the old streets, moving everybody up to the second floor.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  Jenny shakes her head. “Or if a building’s got only one story, they use screw jacks and winch the whole shebang fifteen feet into the air.” She’s distracted by something in a store window. An odd-looking shotgun lies right-angled, as if snapped in two, on a satin pillow with an engraved card: The Long-Awaited Anson and Deeley Boxlock. Tapping on the next window, Jenny remarks, “You could think of having him sit for a new photograph.”

  Sometimes Jenny’s non sequiturs make Blanche’s head spin. Is this some kind of cruel joke about Arthur’s face?

  “The kid, I mean.”

  “Oh.” When she looks closer, she sees the display is headed Infant Carte de Visites and Cabinet Cards. Discomfited, Blanche looks down at P’tit.

  “The picture beside your bed’s not much of a likeness anymore.”

  “Maybe when he’s … grown a little,” says Blanche. The photographs behind the glass show fat, bland babies in embroidered gowns. Maybe once P’tit’s got some more hair to cover that protruding forehead, and a tooth or two, when he’s no longer so red and scaly …

  “He’s bigger and stronger already,” says Jenny as they walk on. “You’re just too close up to notice.”

  “He can’t do much more than flap around like a fish on dry land,” Blanche complains. “Sometimes I think he’ll never learn to crawl, even. I’ll be hauling him around like some millstone for the rest of my days.”

  “Why’d you name him P’tit? Because he’s undersized?”

  She shakes her head. “For his father—he’s really P’tit Arthur.” Saying Arthur’s name hurts her throat. Those bloodred blisters. “I was christened Adèle myself,” she adds. Only the small sensation—a coin dropping—alerts her to the fact that this is the first time she’s mentioned it to anyone in America. “Blanche was my circus name.”

  “When did you switch?”

  “On the ship.”

  “Because America’s one big circus?”

  That makes Blanche laugh.

  “He smiled,” cries Jenny, pointing.

  She examines P’tit’s pained face. “Probably just wind.”

  Up ahead, the busy thoroughfare of Market Street slashes diagonally toward the docks. Blanche turns back west on Bush Street.

  Jenny follows her, asking, “Why didn’t Arthur and Ernest change to their circus names too?”

  “Maybe because it might be hard to get much respect down at the Exchange,” says Blanche, “going by Castor and Pollux.”

  Jenny sniggers at that.

  “They took the names from the pair of elephants at the Paris Zoo. Who got butchered when we were under siege by the Prussians,” Blanche adds regretfully.

  Ernest insisted they should at least taste the original Castor and Pollux, as what he called a mark of respect, so he stood in line for hours and paid an appalling price for a slice. He and Arthur agreed that it was tough and oily, but Blanche wasn’t able to bring herself even to taste it, despite her hunger. Dog, cat, rat. That winter, Paris restaurants vied with one another to see who could serve them up in the most delectable sauces, defying the invaders.

  “If you were all such toasts of the town back at your Cirque d’Hiver, what made you give it up and come over here?”

  Machine-Kneaded Bread, Blanche reads on a card in a storefront, Guaranteed Free of Dangerous Perspiration. “It was time for a change.”

  “Meaning, none of my business?”

  “Arthur fell,” says Blanche with difficulty. “His back—”

  “Ah,” says Jenny.

  It was only a month after Blanche told Arthur she was pregnant. She was lacing herself tight to hide it from Monsieur Loyal and praying he’d take her back on after the confinement. “The crowd usually swoon for the flier because they think it’s all his doing,” says Blanche, “that he’s somersaulting through the air, and the lanky fellow dangling upside down like a bat is just there for the flier to grab on to, see?”

  Jenny’s nodding.

  “But the truth is, it’s the catcher who times it all and makes the catch. His flier just has to trust him and fly.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “Arthur …” Blanche sighs. “Maybe he lost his nerve, I don’t know. But it looked to me as if he snatched at Ernest’s wrists and then slipped through his fingers.” The plummet to the ground, the terrible sound.

  “So it wasn’t Ernest’s fault that his old pal cracked his spine.”

  “Try convincing Ernest of that,” says Blanche with a snort. Is that why Ernest is risking his own life to nurse Arthur now? she wonders. In Ernest’s mind, does he owe Arthur a lifetime of protection—by some kind of unwritten contract—for having once let him fall?

  They’re going past the open door of a fan-tan joint where copper coins are heaped high and Chinese men shout their bets through the thick fog of smoke.

  Jenny brushes a bill-papered wall with her fingertips. “Saw this astounding dog act one time,” she remarks. “There was a rope hanging from the top of the tent, and the little fellow jumped higher than his head and grabbed it between his teeth—”

  “A terrier?” Blanche wants to know.

  A nod. “He bit down and wouldn’t let go, swung all over the place, better than any of the acrobats. Holding on with his teeth!”

  “Dogs, horses, they’re born to please,” Blanche tells her. “Now, house cats—I don’t know why folks keep trying to come up with cat acts. You can bribe or beat a cat all day, and it’s still going to sneak off through a slit in the curtain as soon as your back is turned.”

  Jenny’s not listening, because she’s studying a broadside pasted to a telegraph pole.

  Professor of Dancing, Newly Arrived from Philadelphia, Offers Instructions on the Latest Dances à la Mode as Seen in the Ballrooms of London and Paris. Expert on the Quadrille, German, Valse, Schottische, Zulma, Varsouvienne, Boston Dip, Redowa, Gorlitza, Galop, and Polka Mazurka.

  “‘Private Lessons for Young Ladies,’” Jenny reads aloud from the bottom of the page. “I’ll bet,” she adds with a snigger.

  “‘Send Them to Dancing School and Save Many a Doctor’s Bill,’” Blanche reads over her shoulder. “Health is a smart angle. But the quack’s not as à la mode as he thinks. I wouldn’t be caught dead dancing the redowa anymore.”

  “You know all these fiddly steps?” Jenny asks.

  Blanche smiles. “As well as you know your fiddly frogs.”

  P’tit starts to wail for no reason, as if an invisible assailant has punched him. Bordel! There’s brown trickling down his leg. Blanche holds him at arm’s length.

  “He’s crying for you,” Jenny comments.

  “I’m right here,” Blanche snaps.

  “No, I mean, for you—putting on a show for your benefit. I suppose crying’s all the music a baby knows.”

  “Some music.” She groans.

  Jenny holds out her hands.

  “He’s all shitty.”
/>   “That don’t bother me. I’ve seen it all before.”

  She deposits P’tit in Jenny’s arms, expecting him to shriek, but he only stares at Jenny.

  Blanche pulls out a handkerchief and scrubs her hands. “Where have you seen it all before?” This comes out too accusatory. “Have you younger sisters or brothers?”

  “I was a shepherd for a while,” says Jenny.

  Blanche laughs under her breath. A female shepherd. Of course.

  By the time she’s rubbed the worst off her sleeve and skirt, Jenny and the baby are way ahead. Blanche catches up to them and finds Jenny halfway through the old tale about the Frog Prince, addressing P’tit with utmost seriousness.

  He’s rapt.

  “Is that the one where she’s obliged to kiss him in the end?” Blanche breaks in.

  Jenny shakes her head. “Not this princess. Froggie asks for a kiss, yeah, but she says he must be kidding,” she tells P’tit. “She picks him up and flings him against the wall.”

  Like the way Blanche has seen Chinese fishermen whack squid against walls to soften them, down at the docks? “Does that kill him?”

  “No sirree. Froggie falls down, and up jumps a prince.”

  But Blanche is still brooding over the version her grandmother told her. The clammy embrace, the moist tickle on the lip. “How could being kissed and being smacked against a wall work the same?”

  “Shock, I guess,” says Jenny. “Shakes off his sham skin, leaves him wearing his real one.”

  And Blanche—just for a moment—has a vision as if from high overhead: Herself at the height of rage throwing P’tit against a wall. His scaly, misshapen body cracking in two when it hits, and her son standing up in a smooth and princely form.

  She knows these are terrible thoughts, but they’re not really hers, she tells herself, they’re just the hallucinations of fatigue. She feels Jenny’s eyes on her and looks away in case the frog-catcher can catch thoughts too.

  Somebody’s watching and waiting for him,

  Yearning to hold him again to her breast.

  It’s an old soldier on the ground, bursting into song. No, not on the ground. He’s legless, Blanche sees, and what’s left of him is wedged into a child’s pushcart.

  Matted and damp are his tresses of gold,

  Kissing the snow of that fair young brow.

  The fellow’s not so old either, Blanche sees when she looks closer. The War between the States is only a decade back, after all. His voice is richer than some she’s heard on the stage; this fellow was wasted on soldiering. He keeps up the maudlin lament that shouldn’t move her the way it does.

  Pale are the lips of most delicate mold,

  Somebody’s darling is dying now.

  She takes P’tit back from Jenny without a word, presses him against her collarbone.

  Jenny sketches a salute and drops a coin into the soldier’s tin cup.

  Somebody’s watching over Arthur, somebody’s waiting to see if he’ll make it, but it’s not Blanche. What if she goes back to the apartment tonight and Arthur’s lying utterly still in the bed that used to be theirs? She can’t bear for his pain to go on but she can’t wish it all to be over. He’s not even thirty-two. And what would become of Blanche then? She can’t imagine her life in San Francisco without Arthur. It drifts apart, in her mind, like shreds of fog.

  They turn north up Dupont. Jenny flourishes her hand at a restaurant, the Poodle Dog. “Famous for its cuisses de grenouille à la poulette, courtesy of yours truly.”

  Also famous for its third-floor assignation rooms, Blanche remembers, in one of which she spent a tiring night with a miner with black-rimmed nails who left her a bag of gold dust the weight of a plum.

  Chinatown, lacking gaslights, marks its territory with red paper lamps, and the glowing globes remind Blanche that this stroll is nearly over. She dreads the thought of home.

  She suddenly steps sideways. For explanation, she holds up her left boot.

  “Sure is the biggest turd I’ve seen in some time,” says Jenny. “Dog?”

  “Let’s hope so. That’s a week of luck.” Blanche scrapes it off her shoe using the frayed edge of the sidewalk, thinking of Arthur.

  Jenny whoops with laughter. “I thought the whole point of luck is that it just happens.”

  Blanche purses her lips. “Maybe you can grab it sometimes, if you see it passing.”

  The hot sky’s black by the time they reach 815 Sacramento. “I’m off,” remarks Jenny in the stairwell, collecting her machine.

  “Where to?”

  “High-wheeling around.”

  “But where’ll you sleep?”

  “Ain’t tired,” Jenny assures her. “I already snoozed half the day away in Portsmouth Square.”

  “A bientôt, then,” says Blanche shortly and heads up the stairs, P’tit heavy with sleep against her chest.

  “Very soon. Bonne chance, and all that.”

  But it’s not luck Blanche needs, it’s knowledge. Someone who understands the obscure miseries of babies. Someone who’s stumbled on a cure for smallpox. Someone who’d stay and make everything better instead of zipping off down the street whistling a tune Blanche doesn’t know.

  Upstairs, the apartment is silent. She manages to change P’tit’s diaper without waking him, which is a minor miracle. Once she’s put him in his trunk, she’s weary enough to drop right down on the sofa in her street clothes. But first she makes herself go to the slightly open door of the sickroom.

  That awful, sweet odor. Mercifully dim in here now, so she can’t see anything but the silhouette of Ernest bent over the bed. Arthur moans, deep in his dream. Blanche’s eyes adjust. Ernest seems to be bandaging—no, he’s tying Arthur to the bedstead with long strips of cotton.

  “What the hell—” Her whisper comes out louder than it’s meant to.

  Ernest turns on her. “Oh, now you come home?”

  “What are you doing to him?”

  “Stopping him from scratching.” Ernest turns back to his meticulous work of looping the cotton around Arthur’s slack wrists and attaching the strips to the metal frame. “Three scabs on his eyelid this evening, and they’re itching like the devil. If he scratches them, he could blind himself.”

  Scabs?

  The twelfth day.

  It hits her: they’re not going to lose Arthur after all.

  It’s the fifteenth of September, one day since Blanche should have died at San Miguel Station. Paying for her ham sandwich on Clay Street, for the first time since she’s come to America she doesn’t leave a tip on the counter. She stares into her pocketbook, adding up the coins. That icy Madame, with her invented expenses, has reduced Blanche to this, a fretful miser. Maybe Blanche should have gone to one of those free lunch places where all you have to pay for is your drink. Maybe she should have invited a stranger to buy her a proper meal.

  Arthur could be watching her this very moment. She knows she’s an easy target, standing a couple of blocks from her own building in broad daylight, as bright as some maypole in her blue plaid and yellow stockings. She shrinks behind her parasol and chews the sandwich so fast she almost chokes.

  Her eyes are resting on a newsboy at the corner of Kearny. His cap and the impression he gives of only half filling his shabby blue jacket remind her of Jenny. “Chronicle, latest Chronicle, afternoon edition,” he’s bawling, pale behind his inky smears. Only now does Blanche’s brain register what’s printed on his big sign: FOUL MURDER; TROUSERED PUZZLE.

  She shouldn’t read it. What possible good will it do her to—

  She gallops down to him and holds out a coin, unable to speak. Somehow afraid that this gamin will guess Blanche is part of the story behind his shrill headlines.

  She finds a wall to lean against. Angles her parasol to hide her face as she fingers the front page. An engraving of a glum-looking woman in a sack suit; is that supposed to be Jenny? Unknown Assassin, says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre t
o see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the army at Little Bighorn. Cartwright sounds as if he’s still down there in San Miguel Station. He must have composed the piece in a terrible rush for it to be printed and sold all through the City already. Could he have telegraphed his report in? Blanche glances up at the nearest pole, picturing words hissing like lightning along the thin skein of wire.

  He calls Jenny the Little Frog-Catcher. Why “little,” when she was pretty tall for a woman? That has the ring of some sentimental novel. And “masquerading in men’s clothing”—that sets Blanche’s teeth on edge; was it Jenny’s fault if her pants made unobservant people jump to the wrong conclusions?

  … had a strong distaste for domestic drudgery. She could hardly chase amphibians in trailing skirts and, besides, regarded the prohibition on the wearing of trousers as arbitrary and oppressive.

  The journalist sounds as if he likes what he knows of Jenny but thinks it was somehow her own doing—or at least, to be expected—that she got herself blown to pieces. Blanche is reading too fast now, and she loses the thread. She doubles back.

  A real strong-minded, unconventional “character,” who got into scrapes with the law from a tender age and whose arrests were prompted as much by drunken belligerence, truth be told, as by her eccentric costume and—

  Arrested for “drunken belligerence”? Does Cartwright have a source among the patrolmen for that? “Truth be told.” He’s probably making up this moonshine himself.

  Blanche leafs through the pages to track down the second half of the story, eyes flicking over hundreds of other items in tiny print. The heat wave’s killing children in record numbers. Vandals who open hydrants will be liable to prosecution. A sketch of a rather lovely striped bonnet. “City health officer calls Orientals who refuse to report smallpox cases ‘tens of thousands of treacherous snakes in our very bosom.’”

  “Possibly Jenny was frail.” That word trips Blanche up; she reads it again, and anger pulses behind her eyes. Frail: a namby-pamby euphemism for selling it. Oh, so now the pallid newsman is claiming Jenny was on the town? That’s rich.