Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Mag planted her hand on one hip and studied Famke. “You want dosing, maybe some mercury—why, my sister had that very look when—”

  “Enough from you, Mag.” A tall woman dressed in peacock blue taffeta came forward through the motto-less inner door, and Mag flung herself down on the sofa, lower lip pouting, bosom heaving. This was obviously Opal Cinque. And she was a stout woman who dyed her hair orange.

  Famke did not look at the painting again. Instead she watched Opal Cinque screw a cheroot into an ebony holder with a deliberate motion of wrist and elbow. The cold electrical lights made everything look strange and ugly: They faded the madam’s hair to a peculiar pale shade and showed up the wrinkles around her mouth, the dirt on the skirting boards, the worn places on the furniture. They showed the difference between the Nimue found here and the one Famke knew so well.

  Mrs. Cinque asked for a lucifer, and for the first time Famke noticed that there were other customers, sturdy men in warm suits looking at the shabby boy she made and laughing at him. She noticed, also, piano music playing smartly. It was a tune Albert had sung her once, about a girl who wandered around crying about cockles and muscles or some such things.

  Famke was suddenly tired. She dropped down next to Mag, conjuring her own cloud of dust. Her throat felt terribly sore, and she had to dig her heels into the carpet to keep from sliding down the slippery pinkness. There seemed to be too much to remember.

  Standing on the ladder before Nimue, Albert just below her, pushing her to paint the ice, pulling her down to their bed . . . Famke was not glad to look up and see, reflected in the enormous glowing mirror, an image of herself crowded together with Mag and the three blondes, beneath another image of herself—or someone who had long ago been herself—coughing out a pantheon’s worth of whorish Muses. If this was the kind of narrative Albert was painting these days, how far apart the two of them had really drifted.

  “Albert Castle,” she said hoarsely. “I am looking for him.”

  “Are you.” Opal Cinque took a long drag on her cheroot, the very picture of calm. She offered no information.

  “Where is he?”

  Mrs. Cinque shrugged her shoulders, exaggerated in their blue taffeta and their wreath of smoke. “Your guess good as mine. What’s your interest—are you an inkslinger?”

  Famke swallowed hard again. “The paper said he finished this afternoon—”

  “Papers lie,” said Mrs. Cinque. “You must be a pretty poor correspondent, or you’d know that. Clio, give the boy your handkerchief.”

  Famke took it without thinking and let it ball in her fist. “I am an artist,” she said, blinking rapidly. The electricity had power to addle the brains; it was as if the currents in the walls and floors were making her limbs tremble. She felt all the customers and all the girls were staring at her. “Do you wish any change to that painting?”

  “Change the painting?” Mrs. Cinque flicked ash into the cuspidor. A wrinkle formed between her eyes as she looked hard at Famke. “Why?”

  “I love that painting!” Mag declared passionately. The blondes murmured agreement. “I wouldn’t touch a line!”

  “What is it you want here, my boy?” asked Mrs. Cinque.

  “Yes,” Mag said more softly, “what do you want?”

  Tingling, with a buzz in her head, Famke turned to Mag. She did not know what to do next. Blue eyes looked into brown; uncertainly, Mag smiled. Famke’s ears roared, and there was a lump in her throat so large she could not speak.

  She thought of something: She took Mag’s face in her hands and kissed her. She made it a deep and hungry kiss, the kind the girls of the Immaculate Heart of Mary had given each other, and she tried to spin one of the old stories in her head: The cottager comes home and finds his house has been burgled . . . She pushed her tongue into Mag’s mouth, probing it, trying to find what Albert had left there—for she was certain in that moment that Albert had kissed Mag, had perhaps even made love to her. So Famke explored the corners of Mag’s mouth, looking for traces of Albert, perhaps even traces of herself. Of this new Nimue.

  When the kiss was finished, Mag swayed backward and studied Famke even more dubiously. “You sure do that funny.”

  At that, Famke opened her mouth again—but not to kiss or speak. She opened her mouth because her throat felt hot and full, and because she needed to breathe and couldn’t. She exhaled, and a flood of heat came pouring over her lips.

  “Christ and the devil!” Mag tumbled off the sofa. “That’s blood!”

  The roar in Famke’s head grew deafening. It was much easier to slip into unconsciousness than to reply. She slid down the pink satin slope and landed in a heap at Opal Cinque’s feet.

  Chapter 32

  The city [Santa Fé] is free from malaria and excessive heat and cold, and from wind and sand storms. It is supplied with pure water and pure air from the mountains surrounding; it has delightful scenery beneath bright sunshine with glorious sunsets; and besides possessing wonderful health-giving properties, it is one of the most comfortable residence cities in the world. This fact is rapidly becoming known and appreciated.

  STANLEY WOOD,

  OVER THE RANGE TO THE GOLDEN GATE

  For long timeless hours, Famke lay pitching and rolling, throwing sweat-soaked covers off her body one moment and burrowing into them the next, after shadowy hands restored them gently to her. She was aware that she was ill and that her throat ached. Sometimes a basin was held under her mouth or her bottom, and at those moments she was very ill indeed; sometimes a spoon forced her teeth to unclench and dribbled a foul, burning liquid—much worse than Piso’s or Deseret’s or even Lydia E. Pinkham’s cure—down her throat. Almost always, she coughed, and the bed rocked like a ship.

  Despite this discomfort, there were moments of beauty. Colors pulsed around her—blue, red, orange, rose, dripping from the ceiling and over the sheets, over her body. She was delighted to discover those colors were there even when she closed her eyes; they were stars that burst and spread across her eyelids, butterflies that flew slowly by, trailing clouds of tiny bright feathers. Waves of luscious-hued feeling washed through her, until she could feel her heart beat in every place she could name.

  Opal Cinque visited, and the blonde girls, and Mag. Sometimes they brought curiosities: a dwarf dressed in a tiny replica of Opal’s blue gown; or a tall girl who had a beautiful face but no arms, and only one leg to hop about on; or a midnight-dark woman who sponged her gently all over, with special care for her underarms and the furrows between her legs.

  Sometimes Mag stayed, and the kisses she gave Famke were deep and refreshing and delicious. They lingered on her lips and suckled there, as Albert had once done, before moving down to pepper Famke’s neck, her bosom, the ticklish line below her ribs, the wing of her hipbone, and then—

  Famke groaned and pushed the covers away. The dark hands replaced them. An angel with fiery wings lay against her, rubbing her body on Famke’s, her wing between Famke’s legs. Famke realized they were both naked. A line of print unfurled before her eyes, at the same time read aloud in what she was surprised to recognize as Myrtice’s voice: “When a painting of the nude by its spirit and surroundings directs the mind away from the element of artistic beauty, it becomes vulgar.” How funny to find Myrtice here. She would have to tell Heber when she joined him at the doctor’s office—if only he would keep his nasty worms from gnawing away at Nimue . . .

  “Fanden,” she whispered.

  “Who are you, really?” the angel whispered back, holding her tighter and tighter, till it seemed Famke’s ribs must break and her heart pop through her lips.

  When he’d written to Birgit, Viggo had felt no need to mention the painting he had seen in New York. He had been even gladder of his decision once he reached Denver and saw the first of what, even then, he suspected would be a long trail of pictures featuring the face that had finally grown so familiar as he gazed into the handbill, now printed on expensive yellow paper. He fancied that if sh
e knew her pet’s likeness was found in places the like of which Birgit could scarcely have heard, that news would have the power to strike the nun down, to bring her to bed of chagrin, even to kill her. Women were so delicate. Viggo was grateful to have the means of protecting both of those he knew best; all he had to do was hold his tongue.

  Contrary to what he might have expected if he’d thought it all out, Viggo found his love for Famke undiminished by the images he now found up and down Denver’s Holladay Street and, as he traveled onward, in the bagnios of the smaller towns. They were all enchanting—the Muses, the Valkyries, the nymphs in their caves. Even the pictures’ lesser satellites, those bordello denizens, glowed with the reflected light of Famke’s unearthly beauty. Viggo could and did find reason to gaze on the images for hours.

  “Are you an artist yourself?” asked Mrs. Maud Dempster, spare-boned proprietress of a house in Frisco, Colorado. Her ochre-tinted Twilight of the Muses was the talk of the town.

  “No,” he replied truthfully, “but I do paint people.”

  As it happened, Mrs. Dempster’s back room held a flower fading fast. The madam was relieved to assure herself of Viggo’s services and save the expense of sending to Leadville for a more expensive mortician; and so the contents of the carpetbag came in useful at last. He stayed on a day and a half, waiting for the big girl known as Wobbles to expire of what Maud called fever ’n ague but a more practiced doctor might have named malaria—rare but not unheard of in late autumn. When she was finished, he prepared her for her final party.

  “May I place the painting in the room where I work?” he asked, with the scrupulous politeness that was endearing him to the prostitute nation. “I can make Miss Wobbles appear as she was painted.”

  The result, Mrs. Dempster’s girls agreed, was better than life, even better than the painting; and Viggo’s future was made. All across the mountains he loved, he might earn room, board, and rail passage by restoring a temporary bloom to the fair but frail women who’d fallen prey to a diphtheria epidemic, laudanum overdose, or the violence of the Dynamite Gang. Bungled abortions did him a brisk trade, thanks to rusty wires and a rumor that a baby would leave a mother quietly if she ate fifty or sixty phosphorous matchheads. Without a mortician’s system of tubes and pumps with which to drain the bodies, he could not give a complete embalming; but with the camphor and arsenic he carried, he could do enough to make a corpse look appealing for the duration of a dinner and a wake and the flash of a camera, if there was one in town.

  The madams who were willing to pay him for the preservation of these girls—their own favorites, surrogate daughters and sisters—were touched that in his zeal for realism and authenticity he wished to follow these artistic models so closely. Some of them already had photographs they tried to foist on him instead, but he always asked for and eventually received private access to the paintings.

  “There is no color in a photograph,” he learned to explain. “For life to appear we must have color.”

  Indeed, in those parts of the West, photographs were most often associated with death, for it was only in extremis that most ordinary people thought to have their loved ones’ portraits made. The painted portrait was the living art form, which was why the madams covered those pictures with shawls when the first guests filed in for a funeral. Funerals were surprisingly good for business; gazing on the dead made customers appreciate the living that much more, and they buried their sentimental regrets between the legs of the deceased’s sister whores. Viggo never quite realized just how valuable his work there was.

  One well-read madam was so mournfully gratified by his efforts that she presented him with a box of calling cards identifying the name and profession she thought were his:

  Vigo Hart

  - professor of the chthonic arts -

  traveling

  Viggo saved these cards carefully, in the packet with the diminishing stack of Famke’s pictures that he was leaving in the towns and houses he visited. He thought he might never give a single one of the cards out, unless he wrote to Birgit again: In their own way, they were beautiful, too, and must be cherished up and treasured. They wove him into the tapestry of Mæka, the land in which beauty reigned supreme, even after death.

  Chapter 33

  We can not possibly describe the attractions of these resorts. They are at once terrible, overpowering, lonely, and full of indescribable majesty. Amid them all the tourist travels daily, imbibing the life-giving, beautiful, fresh air full of its oxygen to quicken and stimulate the system; the eye drinks in the wealth of scenery, and loves to note the beauties of the wonderful glowing sunlight, and the occasional cloud-storms, and wild display of power and glory.

  FREDERICK E. SHEARER, ED.,

  THE PACIFIC TOURIST

  On the morning Famke’s fever broke, she found that the black hands she’d dreamt of were spooning a gruel down her still-burning throat, and Cracklin’ Mag was standing at the room’s tiny window, tugging at the curtain so as to see into the litter-strewn courtyard outside. The light was dull and gray, like the once-white walls, and the cloud she thought she’d been sleeping on was a lumpy mattress that seemed to have been set on a boulder. There was a terrible smell of hot flesh that Famke hoped was not her own. She inhaled to find out, then choked. Gruel splattered the bed, the walls, and even Mag, who turned quickly and gave a wide pink grin to see Famke awake.

  “I knew there was something different about today!” She bounced onto the bed and, heedless of the sticky gruel, kissed Famke quickly on the brow. The black servant had vanished momentarily. “Here you are, awake at last, and your eyes have a look to ’em they haven’t had in a while. You see me now, don’t you?” She made as if to drop another kiss.

  Weakly, Famke turned her head away and coughed. She was confused—this could be a dream, too, or maybe none of it was. “Can you . . . my . . . Albert . . .”

  “Shh.” Mag laid a butterfly finger on Famke’s lips, then touched it to her own, as if she had an itch there. “You’ve had an awful septic throat. You shouldn’t talk much if you can help it.”

  The dark servant came back with a wet cloth and swabbed Famke’s face clean. “Mrs. Cinque she coming”—the woman’s accent was nearly unintelligible to Famke—“and she will know what you be.”

  “Yes, darlin’,” said Mag, “tell us who you are.” She laughed quickly, her eyes luminous with excitement—or perhaps with the belladonna that some of the fair but frail used to keep their eyes bright. “All we know is you’re not the man we thought you were.”

  Famke was defeated, and too exhausted to think of a new lie. “My name is Famke Sommerfugl.” She whispered because of her throat.

  The black and white faces exchanged a look. Both wore the same impenetrable expression.

  “Fanny?” the servant tried.

  “Summer fool?” Mag echoed the immigration agent from New York, and suddenly Famke felt as if she had made no progress at all, as if she were back at that busy, confusing, hopeful day on the dock. Albert had surely left Santa Fé long ago, and there was no telling how many days she, Famke, had lain here.

  “What kind name be that one?”

  Famke turned her head into the pillow and wept.

  She didn’t weep long, however, because Opal Cinque turned up quickly, wearing a red velvet wrapper and an air of haste, as if she’d been disturbed in the middle of a transaction. She was puffing away at another cheroot—much as Albert did, Famke thought; but then again, not like him at all.

  “So you must be Bertie’s girl.”

  Bertie. What a dreadful name. “You know him? My brother?” Famke didn’t want to tell Opal how the smoke bothered her throat. She tried to lie straight in her sickbed and take shallow breaths. “Did he tell you about me?”

  Opal gave one of her characteristic shrugs and filled her lungs. “Your brother, is he.”

  Cracklin’ Mag spoke eagerly into the silence: “Imagine our surprise when we picked you up off the floor and found you weren�
�t a customer at all! You could have knocked the lot of us down with a feather. We thought you were a newspaperman at first—a good number have come by since we got the ’lectric and that big painting—”

  “Mag insisted we keep you here, as a special favor to her,” Opal interrupted.

  “That’s right,” Mag interrupted in her turn. “I said, ‘We can’t just turn a poor sister out in the cold—’”

  “Leastways,” Opal continued implacably, “not after giving her a kiss, no charge. We went through your things to find out who your people were, and your pockets weren’t too fat. So we gave you this little back room here. Our Chinese cook used to sleep in it before he lit out for the goldmines. It’s a dollar a night.”

  “I’m sure I’m very grateful,” Famke said in her best imitation of Sariah, though the price seemed high to her.

  “I found a nice little picture that looks to be of you,” Mag said, plumping up Famke’s pillow, “though the features have smeared. Daisy—that’s the maid—washed that little yellow bag. Don’t look so rattled—we put everything back in it, and I mended the seams myself. It’s right here on this little table—”

  “Fanny,” Opal broke in again, as seemed to be her habit, “are you familiar with a gentleman who calls himself Hermes?”

  Perhaps she should have been surprised, but she wasn’t. “I have met him,” she said cautiously. Nothing good had ever come of knowing Harry Noble.

  “He came by the very morning before you did.” Mag brushed the dirty hair away from Famke’s brow. “He wanted to find out about the painting—wrote about it for the New Mexican. But he asked about you, too.”

  Opal inhaled one last time and set the stub of her cheroot down in a little crystal dish. “Ursula Summerfield, he said, Mag. But I suspect it’s you he’s after—there can’t be too many red-haired lungers calling themselves Summer in this territory. He said he’d be in town a few days and to let him know if you turned up. Maybe you’re his mistress as well as Bertie’s?”