Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  "And just what do you think you're doing?" Fannie's voice, stern now, jolted me out of that speculation. While I thought she was in the dining room, she had come from behind me.

  "I... I was just..."

  "You were just peeking," she said without the slightest bit of amusement in her voice. "Do you want to go out there and join them?"

  "No," I said quickly, "no, I really don't."

  "Then I'd suggest you get back to your books. And don't let me ever find you 'peeking' again."

  "Yes, ma'am." I barely had time to notice that Juniper stood behind Fannie, her eyes red as though she'd been crying. As I turned into my room, I heard Fannie say, "Juniper, you go on upstairs and take the night off. We'll work on this."

  Work on what? I wondered.

  * * *

  Twice the first year I lived there Fannie closed the house because a special group of men arrived. The first time I was ordered not to leave my room, the order so sternly delivered that I was cowed and did not disobey. But to me the usual noises of the night were exaggerated—the men's voices, the women's laughter were all louder. And late at night, as I lay in my bed, I heard a man come back to Fannie's room with her. The door shut tightly, and I heard no more, but I was left with more questions than usual. The second time it happened, I was determined to find out who these men were. Though I dared not creep all the way to the parlor, I did go as far as the stairway hall where I could hide in the shadows under the stairs. I had to wait longer than usual for any couples to go upstairs—apparently, from the sounds of it, they were all having a riotous time in the parlors. Finally, though, they began to drift upstairs in pairs—these men were cowboys. At least they wore denim pants and shirts, leather vests, kerchiefs about their necks, and carried Stetsons. They looked, somehow, rougher than Fannie's usual clientele did—I didn't know what made me think that, maybe beards and mustaches, maybe their swagger as they walked. Whatever, there was something different about them.

  And also something remarkable—most wore gun belts, and Fannie apparently overlooked her rule about checking guns at the door. These men, whoever they were, were a group apart for Fannie and the girls.

  The second time they came, the men stayed four days and Fannie closed the house to all others the entire time. I found it tiresome, because I was confined to my room, unless I could sneak into the kitchen to visit with Julie and Hodge. But even they were less talkative and more on edge than usual, and they absolutely refused to tell me anything about our "guests."

  Finally, the men left. That night, Fannie came into my room, as she put it, to check on my studies.

  "How's school?" she asked brightly. "Haven't had much of a chance to check on you the last few days."

  "You've been busy," I muttered. Then, boldly, "Who were those men?"

  "Men?" she asked vaguely, which made me explode at her.

  How dumb did she think I was? "The men," I said patiently, "for whom you closed the house, the men who stayed four days instead of one night, the men who apparently wore their guns to bed."

  "How do you know that?" she snapped. "You've been peeking again."

  "Just from behind the stairwell," I said. "If you'd told me who they were, maybe I wouldn't have peeked."

  She looked at me for a long time without speaking. "You're right," she finally said. "I should have told you. They're outlaws." She waited to see if I would be shocked.

  "I'm an outlaw," I said. "At least, I'm on the outside of the law. Why are they outlaws?"

  "They rob banks and trains, and they come here to celebrate—sometimes to hide—after a job. They're... they're good customers."

  "I can imagine," I said dryly.

  It was a long time before the subject of outlaws came up again.

  Insert space break, please

  "Etta, can you read the next passage from the reader?" Sister Magdalena looked at me with her bright smile of anticipation.

  I rattled off the passage, missing not a word. Behind me I heard a whisper and a giggle.

  "Children, children, we will have order when one of our number reads aloud." Sister was indignant, as though misbehavior was beyond her comprehension.

  I knew what the whisper was and why they giggled. Word had spread throughout the school that I was the girl who lived in a whorehouse—oh, they called it a female boardinghouse, the euphemism of the day, and most of them probably didn't even know what it meant, but they knew it was dirty. Tarnished was the word that came to mind. And I was the object of jokes because of it. I was getting very tired of the fourth form.

  Within a month, I was promoted to the fifth, then the sixth form, and finally I was with the small group of girls my own age that still remained in school. Sister Theresa assured Fannie that I was making remarkable progress, but still two years yawned before me like an endless time. I wanted the schooling desperately, but I found I hated school—rather like writer Mark Twain when he said he hated writing but liked having written. I would have liked having been schooled—in the past. The lessons were easy for me, the sisters treated me as though I was breakable, and the other girls acted like I was a freak. I cared nothing for any of them.

  "I'm Elizabeth, and I know where you live," said a girl in the upper level. She was pretty, probably too pretty for her own good, with curly dark blond hair piled around her face and caught with a fashionable ribbon at the back of her neck.

  I nodded. What, after all, could I say?

  "You must hate it," she said, drawing on what she must have thought was a deep well of sympathy.

  "No, it's really quite exciting."

  "All those men..."

  "Some of them are quite handsome." I was deliberately making fun of her, though she had no way of knowing it.

  "Do you... will you..."

  I knew what she wanted to ask and thought it rude. "No," I said, though more and more I wondered what I would do when I finished school. My choices seemed limited, but it was not a problem I could discuss with Fannie. And I sure wasn't going to talk to this Elizabeth about it.

  There was one good thing about the school that I much appreciated and that made me think of Mama: They taught manners. We had high tea, just like the English, every afternoon, and each of us in the upper forms had to take turns being hostess. That meant not only pouring the tea and serving the crumpets but also graciously leading the conversation.

  Sister Theresa would give us the topic of the day. It might be the government's treatment of the Indians or whether or not women should have the vote or what was the United States's proper response to the growing unrest in Cuba. We were expected to be able to converse intelligently on these matters.

  There was only one girl who truly became my friend at that school. Her name was Jolie, and her French parents had recently settled in Castroville, south and west of San Antonio. Jolie attended the Ursuline Academy as a boarding student. She was my age or, most likely, even a year or two older, and there was a certain worldliness about her. Like me, she would never have the innocent shine of Sister Theresa's face. "I hate it," she said vehemently, pushing a loose strand of black hair out of her eyes. "The girls, they are all so childish! And there are no men. And no one who speaks French."

  I laughed. "I can't speak French to you, but I can sympathize about the girls. They're dumb and boring. But I don't miss the men."

  "You don't?" She looked at me in disbelief.

  I shrugged and bit my tongue to keep from telling her I knew where the men were if she was interested.

  "I want to bring a friend home from school," I said boldly that evening. "She's a boarding student, and she hates it."

  "I am truly sorry about that," Fannie said, sarcasm creeping into her voice, "but I imagine her family would hate it a lot worse if you brought the girl here."

  "I don't want to be ashamed of where I live," I countered. "I did that all those years with Pa...."

  Fannie never minced her words. "Don't try the pitiful act on me, miss. I know you never had any friends, and I'm sur
e it's hard for you to make friends at the school. But I won't pity you because of what happened to you before... and I won't let you bring another young lady home here.

  "And there's one more thing: I've watched you with Lillie. She's young and friendly and, in her own way, very naive. I don't want you to make friends—close friends, the confiding kind—with any of the girls. You may think some night late that you're sharing confidence and that you can unburden yourself of the story of your father, but you can't. Whores are not to be trusted—never met a one I would really trust—and your story would be all over the house by the next morning and the city by that night. You understand?"'

  I nodded. Fannie had read my mind, for I still longed to tell the story again to someone, if only to banish the ghost of Pa that I kept seeing.

  "You keep your confidences for me," she said, but she had on her businesslike tone and not her laughing, happy personality. It didn't inspire confidences.

  I never did bring Jolie home, though Fannie bought tickets so that Jolie and I could attend the opera when it came to San Antonio. Jolie thought that was every bit as wonderful as visiting me, and she remained the only friend I had in school.

  What the Ursuline Academy taught me, besides education, was to be complete unto myself. I never got over wanting friends, but I learned first in Ben Wheeler and then at Fannie's that they were a luxury I could do without if I had to.

  Isolation was nothing new to me, nor was loneliness. Though I missed Mama desperately, I refused to think about her, to think what she would say if she knew where I was living. Maybe, just maybe, she'd say, "But, Martha, you're getting an education, and maybe it's the Lord's way." But I couldn't be sure of that. I couldn't think about Mama and whores at the same time, and she would have hated that my name had changed.

  If thoughts of Mama troubled me, Pa haunted me, late at night, when I was alone in my bed. I'd sometimes wake in terror, reliving that last night, thinking that he was crawling into my bed again. And then I'd see his face and hear him say, "You've killed me." My heart would pound, and I wanted badly to cry out for Mama to come put her arms around me. But Fannie was not the sort I could call to, and I forced myself to lie quietly in my bed. Sometimes sleep never came until almost morning.

  Chapter 6

  One incident remains forever clear in my mind from the years I lived with Fannie and attended the Ursuline Academy. A strange covered ambulance stood outside the house when I arrived from school one afternoon. Inside, everything was commotion—a police officer stood at the foot of the stairs in the front hall, Julie hovered toward the back of the hall wringing her hands, Lillie and Cassie were collapsed on sofas in the parlor, clinging to one another and sobbing, and Fannie was nowhere to be seen.

  "What...?"

  "Miss Etta, you best go direct to your room," Hodge said in a tone with much more authority than he usually mustered. Even though he had just come in the door with me, he was apparently wise enough in the ways of the world—and of whorehouses—to understand the situation immediately. His warning was, of course, enough to make me go directly to Fannie's room instead of to my own.

  The room was darkened, curtains pulled, and Fannie lay like a mound in the middle of the bed.

  "Fannie?" Creeping closer, I could see that she had a cloth laid across her forehead—I guessed that it was a cold cloth against a headache, like those that Mama had occasionally used.

  "Go away, Etta."

  Even in a short time, Fannie had taught me well. "I will when you tell me what's going on."

  That made her angry enough to sit up in bed, flinging the cloth to the floor. "Why, you ungrateful little..."

  "I'm not ungrateful," I said, almost repentant but not frightened by her. "I know something bad has happened, and I want to know what it is. Then maybe I can be of some help." I paused a minute. "I was raised to be helpful, you know."

  She buried her head in her hands, and I could barely hear what she said. It began with "Juniper..." and trailed off into muttering I couldn't understand.

  Something struck clear to the bone in me, and I remembered Juniper's red eyes the night Fannie caught me peeking. Sitting on the bed to put an arm around Fannie's shoulders, I asked gently, "What about Juniper?"

  "Laudanum. She took laudanum. I... I never had a girl even try that before."

  I had no idea what laudanum was, of course, but it didn't take much to guess. "Is she... is she...?"

  "She's dead," Fannie said bluntly. "Lillie found her 'bout an hour ago. I called the police. I... I guess they'll take her away."

  Juniper, who had always been sad, was sad no more, I thought. "Why did she do that?"

  Fannie sighed, pushed the pillows behind her to prop herself up, and looked at me. "She was caught in the life," she said, "couldn't see any way to get out of it. And she was getting too old."

  "Too old?"

  "A whore's not a lot of use after she's thirty and something," she said bitterly. "Remember that if you're ever tempted to take up the life."

  I wanted to tell her that I knew that the life wasn't what was waiting for me any more than teaching was, but I didn't think this was the time to say it. "I thought you were going to find some place for her to go."

  Fannie shook her head miserably. "I tried. Thought I found a family that had kids and wanted a nursemaid. Juniper, she was raised in a big family, and then once she had two children of her own... She'd have known how to raise those babies."

  "Two children of her own?" I echoed in disbelief.

  "That was why she was so sad, mostly. They drowned, fell into a stock tank when her husband was supposed to be watching them. You can imagine one falling in, but both of them? It... it just broke her apart. She left home and never went back."

  I felt I was drowning in misery myself, as though Fannie were piling detail on detail deliberately to make me sad. Maybe, I thought, there's some kind of moral lesson here I'm supposed to understand. "Juniper didn't get the position as a nursemaid, did she?"

  "No. They decided they couldn't have a fallen woman as a nursemaid. That man—I ought to tell you his name—he's spent more time and money in this house than almost anyone in San Antonio. And then he turns righteous!" Anger was replacing her despair.

  I could see lots of complications she apparently overlooked—mostly the man's wife and her apparently justifiable opinion of Fannie and a woman who had worked for Fannie—but I didn't say that.

  "We've got to arrange the funeral," Fannie said, suddenly her old decisive self again.

  "Does she have family?" I thought about Mama's pitiful funeral and hoped that Juniper had people who would grieve over her.

  "Just that no-account husband, and she sure wouldn't want him around. No, we'll be her family." Within seconds, she was in her wrapper, her hair fixed, her nose powdered, ready to do whatever she had to.

  "Fannie," I said softly as she headed out the door, "how old are you?"

  She turned a wise eye on me. "Twenty-seven. I've got three more years." And then she was gone.

  I didn't believe her for a minute.

  * * *

  Fannie had an awful time trying to find someone to talk over Juniper at the city cemetery. She tried the Catholic priest, who was horrified, and the Methodist and Episcopalian ministers, who declined as politely as they could. The problem, of course, was twofold: Juniper's "profession" and the way she had died.

  Finally, though, Fannie found a relatively young and new Disciples of Christ minister who agreed to say the words.

  For that one day I was allowed to act like the rest of the girls—or at least to join them. It was a dreary February day, and we gathered in the public cemetery, a depressing place where the grave markers were either plain or nonexistent. Fannie had once driven me through a private cemetery on one of our Sunday drives, and I'd seen the elaborate markers rich people put up for their loved ones. In the city cemetery, the graves I'd fixed for Mama and Ab and Pa would have fit right in. There were no trumpeting angels, no smiling cher
ubs, no tall pointed spires that led the soul right up to God.

  "God," the minister intoned, "we ask you to bless this woman whose life was marked by trouble so that she became an outcast of society...."

  The words came to me with a ferociousness that I felt in the pit of my stomach. My life had been marked by trouble, no doubt about that, and I was an outcast from society. If my true identity ever got out, I would be forever shunned—and for something a lot worse than living in a whorehouse. In the midst of the minister's prayer, I gave my own silent prayer to Fannie for having saved me from that fate.

  "She was a victim, Lord, of your terrible vengeance, but also a victim of the world in which she lived. We leave final judgment up to you, O Great Lord, but ask you to look with pity and tenderness upon this thy servant, Juniper."

  There was a loud honking noise, and, startled, I looked up to see Hodge blowing his nose vigorously, while Julie wept openly into a handkerchief. Lillie looked terrified, as though she'd never believed death could come that close to her. Even the flamboyant Wallie was subdued, and Cassie looked upset though she had no tears in her eyes. Only Maud remained unmoved, staring stonily at the casket poised above the unmarked grave.

  Fannie closed the house that night, out of respect, she said, but the next night it was business as usual. And I went back to school feeling more removed than ever from my classmates, who had not an inkling of whores and laudanum and abusive fathers. Even Jolie, I decided, wouldn't understand, and I was relieved that Fannie had not allowed me to bring her home. I had been in San Antonio six months and it seemed in some ways like forever.

  Fannie was in no hurry to find a girl to replace Juniper. For months—almost a year—there were only four girls in Fannie Porter's house. It didn't seem to slow business down much, and it didn't seem to worry Fannie. How one went about recruiting for such a position, I didn't know and I didn't ask.

  Finally, in December of 1893, Annie Rogers appeared in the parlor one evening and was properly introduced, just the way I had been a year earlier. For once, I was allowed—even invited—to the meeting. She was unusually tall but thin, not a big woman like Fannie, and she had fiery red hair—not Wallie's funny henna color—and green eyes that looked as though they were sizing you up. When she appeared at that meeting, Annie wore a conservative white shirtwaist and brown skirt—the sort of thing I would have worn to school—but she didn't look like a schoolgirl. There was something about her that made me think she knew where she was going, what she was after.