Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  With a pair of scissors she found by the washtub, Famke cut her nightgown into a chemise. The skirt would make a good set of feminine cloths—how vexing that she had to think of such things now—or then again, for that purpose there were the maids’ foot bindings, already cut. She tied on the trousers, buttoned up the tunic, and wrapped the nightgown’s skirt around her head, to disguise her hair. She would keep her eyes lowered; perhaps she could find a hat. In any case, no one was likely to look close enough to see that this Chinese maid had blue eyes and an uncommon height, or that she was wearing felt bedroom slippers instead of proper shoes. To most Americans, Chinese were just Chinese.

  She followed the pipes upstairs again to the back door, and she was on the threshold when she pulled herself up short. She could not leave now. Not without what she had come for those many months ago. Had we but world enough and time . . .

  Famke climbed back up to the infirmary wing and used the scissors to jimmy the lock on her studio door. This parting, darling . . .

  She opened up the scissors and ran one blade around the four sides of Hygeia, then rolled the stiff canvas into a cylinder.

  . . . would be no crime. She tied the nymph up with a lock of hair she cut from the top of her head, where it was longest.

  Now she could go. With eleven cents jingling in her borrowed pants pocket and a ruined oil in her hand, she sped out into the early morning, where the honeybees were already dipping into the last of the daffodils and the first of the violets.

  After a long, foot-blistering walk downmountain, Famke skirted Edouard’s fine new hospital and limped toward the lights of the town with a strong sense of possibility. She would find transportation somehow, find a way to San Francisco; for of course that was where she was heading, where she should have gone long ago.

  But in the middle of the village’s main street, she came to a halt. She had been on the point of entering the Springs Hotel, where the stage stop was housed, when she spotted a neatly calligraphed sign in the window. It declared, NO UNACCOMPANIED BLACKS OR CELESTIALS.

  Famke looked down at her costume in disgust. Of course no driver for a line traveled by ladies and gentlemen would give a seat to a Chinese without a white employer of some sort. And of course Famke could not reveal that she was white herself, for then, in this costume, she would be ridiculously easy for Edouard to trace. He had probably notified the hotel staff already—and they alone out of all Hygiene would recognize her, for it was in their parlor, waiting for a stage, that she had collapsed and been sent to the Death Hospital.

  Famke turned around. On the other side of the street, in the window of a general mercantile, she saw another sign:

  Due to risk of contagion,

  municipal regulations strictly forbid spitting in public.

  Carry your expectorations with you.

  Pocket crachoirs available inside.

  Taking this as a kind of portent, Famke reached into her trouser pocket. She found nothing but the eleven cents from the glass house. No tinderbox, no yellow pouch. No means of moving forward.

  It was barely morning, and the clean streets were still shadowed. Famke wandered until she found a little park where she could sit with Hygeia tightly rolled, feeling lonelier than she had since the long, still days in Copenhagen after Albert had left. Now she was even poorer than she had been then, and there was no Sister Birgit to call on. Her months in bed made it impossible for her to trek the many miles to Harmsway, let alone do it in now-threadbare slippers; so she would have to pay for a ride in a wagon. Her limbs felt heavier and slower with each second. Soon she would turn to stone.

  How stupid she had been. A lifetime of bad decisions had brought her lower and lower, when all she had wanted in the world was to recapture that dreamy feeling of perfect love, of being looked at and truly, completely seen. She felt another drop of blood leaking out of her Down There, and she realized she was in an impossible situation.

  Just then an opportunity came along. It came hunching, halting, stopping occasionally to spit into a brass box that Famke concluded must be one of the advertised pocket crachoirs. A man of middle age, out to take the healthful airs. He had the Round Tower eyes and graveyard cough of the terminal lunger.

  He stopped dead when he saw Famke on her bench; even with the wide hat on, she looked like no ordinary Celestial to him. He shuffled up to Famke, and she realized he could be thinking only one thing of her, sitting alone in this deserted park so close to the nighttime. She willed herself not to run away.

  He spat once more for good measure before he spoke. “Sister,” he said in the most polite of voices, “do you have your own room?”

  Mercifully, prices were inflated in that remote region, where Edouard had driven all public women away. Famke was able to get ten dollars merely by retreating into the trees and disrobing for this man, who did not even mind the feminine flow that she wiped away as she removed her underthings. He touched her with moist, cadaverous fingers, and Famke shivered; he pinched a nipple and combed through her tuft of private hair. But he was unable to do more, even when he persuaded her—at the price of ten dollars more—to put her own hand into his pants and touch him. He was as wet and feverish Down There as Famke had ever been; and he was so sick that, strangely, she did not feel at all wrong for touching him, no more than she had ever felt for touching herself.

  “It’s no use,” he gasped at last, flaunting municipal ordinance and spitting red-green into the dirt.

  “It is the opium,” Famke said wisely, helping him with his handkerchief. “It is good for the lungs but bad for letting down the juices.”

  Without asking her what she meant, her client said, “Strike that posture once more. With your fingers in the air.”

  And so, naked, Famke posed as Nimue again.

  Chapter 52

  The Depot bubbles and boils like a caldron. It strikes you queerly that everybody is going, and nobody is staying. The demon of unrest is the reigning king. “Long live the king!” for life is motion. Still life is death’s first cousin.

  BENJ. F. TAYLOR,

  BETWEEN THE GATES

  After she telegraphed her aunt, Myrtice spent some days in bed, recovering from her journey. Since she had been expecting and then disappointed, she’d found herself tiring easily; her feet swelled at the slightest exertion, which had made that trek across the West in search of Viggo—that is, Ursula—a most painful enterprise. Now that she had found him, what a relief it was to lie down in this simple little room (with a convenience under the bed for someone else to empty), to put her feet on the pillow, and to feel the throbbing in them grow gradually weaker, until it no longer eclipsed the pulse of her heart. Viggo had given her a cooling camphor rub for her head, and she found it worked just as beautifully on the feet.

  And yet she found it impossible to relax into sleep. It was not only that farmwife habits told her it was sinful to lie in bed in the daylight, and it was not just that she was glad to have found Viggo. She was also worried about him, for he looked utterly dreadful, hollow eyed and pinch faced, as if suffering from some internal agony. Of course he would not tell her what it was, and Myrtice did not pry. But even as her feet began to recover, Myrtice’s spirits oscillated between joy at the progress she had made on her quest and a distress she thought could hardly be less acute than Viggo’s, for all that it was inspired by sympathy with him. When she thought of him, she felt a tingling in her belly and limbs that completely prevented her from relaxing as she needed. She had to get up and use the convenience almost as often as when she’d been in a condition; her nerves were that worked up.

  One gray evening Señora Garcia came knocking on Myrtice’s door, and then it was time to marvel at the achievements of modern technology. Within a very few days, Sariah had received and replied to Myrtice’s telegram in kind—no doubt at considerable expense, but they must not mind that now. Against all expectation, Sariah had information of her own:

  Yr news recd. Urs. in Hygiene, Calif. See Edward Versa
illes there.

  Heber ill Ft. Yuma infirmary.

  S.

  Myrtice was up and dressed in a matter of seconds; indeed, she had never completely undressed, merely unbuttoned her bodice and loosened her stays. She slid her feet back into the shoes and felt them begin to throb again. But bravely she thumped downstairs and sent word that Viggo should meet her in the parlor.

  From the looks of it, he had spent the days in bed, too, though just as sleeplessly as Myrtice. He had not bothered to shave or comb his hair. Myrtice was touched that he came to her so quickly, and her eyes were bright when she showed him the telegram.

  “We must leave tonight,” Viggo said. “Can you say where this Hygiene is?”

  Myrtice had brought down her copy of The Pacific Tourist and showed him the description. “We take the rails to Harmsway and change there to a stage. We might could be there in five days.”

  Señor Garcia said helpfully, “There is a train south at nine-thirty. But I will have to charge you for the night’s lodging.”

  “Nå, that is not matter,” said Viggo; he, too, had become spendthrift in what he also felt must be the last phase of the search. “It is best if we leave at once.”

  “I’ll pack my bag,” Myrtice offered, hobbling toward the staircase.

  “Mine is ready,” said Viggo.

  Neither one of them commented on Heber’s new predicament. In fact, they had hardly taken it into account; they were both so glad to be leaving Santa Fé. Myrtice looked happily forward to the long trip with Viggo in the second-class car, the soothing touch of his camphor on her forehead, the bitter taste of his arsenic on her tongue. Once they had caught up to Ursula and she had signed the annulment papers, Myrtice would at last be free of family duties. Then, with Viggo there for guidance, she could do whatever she wanted.

  Famke had more cause than ever to be glad of her cure as she endured the journey northward in a third-class carriage. Crammed with her roll of canvas amid the lowest type of worker—broken miners, farmhands, prostitutes, immigrants, non-whites—she had shrunk as close to the window as she could and gulped down the air whistling through its poorly insulated seams, heavy and cindered though that air was, and much as it made her cough. Thankfully, by now she was sure it was just a healthy cough, clearing everyday debris from the lungs; Edouard had given her health enough to go on with.

  Famke’s fellow-passengers, however, reeked of garlic, perspiration, and emanations she did not like to think about; most of them also had the hollow, desperate gaze of the unhealthy and unemployed, the very expression she would not allow herself to wear. No, she might be traveling among such people, but she refused to be one of them. Once she arrived in San Francisco she would find her future: With each turn of the wheels beneath her, she was more certain than ever that Albert would be there. So she banished thoughts of the glass house and its luxuries from her mind and focused resolutely on him, Albert, until she no longer even dreamed of anyone or anyplace else when she dozed. The scrape of the wheels said Sanfrancisco. Sanfrancisco. The steam engine chugged Castle. Castle.

  In the morning of the second day, she stepped into the chaos of a boom-town in early summer, a flood of sounds and smells and faces. Tarry black pavement burned through the ragged bedroom slippers as Famke gulped down more fetid air and held on to Hygeia and tried to get her bearings amidst heavy traffic. Everywhere she looked, she saw something in motion. Even where the carriages and wagons and omnibuses jammed up against each other at a standstill, the horses’ ears flicked, their drivers jumped up and shouted at each other, the animals’ urine hissed into the street and rose up again as a cloud.

  For a moment, the third-class passengers surrounded her again. They seemed to be in their element here and to know at last what they must do; they streamed around Famke and joined the river of humanity rushing downhill, weaving among the vehicles, eyes fixed on some point far ahead, beyond the factories’ and canneries’ puffing smokestacks.

  Famke decided it was best to do as she had always done and start with the proper costume. This impersonation of a Celestial had grown distasteful, and she could accomplish her goals much more quickly if she were dressed as a white person—man or woman, it did not matter much. She still had almost ten dollars left from the man back in Hygiene; it was surely enough for a good suit of clothes.

  She found a street of shops and strolled down it, looking in the windows and debating whether her new costume should be masculine or feminine. A man would command fast answers; yet Famke thought it would be best if the first time Albert saw her again she were dressed as a girl. Now that she had breasts again, she longed to display them. In the window of one ladies’ outfitter she saw a blue-sprigged frock, readymade, that looked as if it might do; so she stepped inside, savoring the tinkle of a genteel brass bell.

  The woman at the counter looked up from a pile of linens and gave Famke a cold stare. “Service entrance is round back,” she said slowly, as if speaking to an imbecile, and she pointed a finger on which a misting of black hairs showed to the knuckle. There was a more pronounced sprinkle on her upper lip. “If you’re delivering that package, you’ll need to do it there.”

  “I’m not a servant,” Famke said, clutching Hygeia tight. “I am here to buy a dress for myself.”

  The woman looked close and saw that Famke was in fact not the Celestial that her attire announced her to be. Nonetheless, the combination of blue eyes, gray tunic, and paper-white skin indicated that nothing good might be afoot, and she shooed Famke out of her store.

  “But my own clothes were stolen!” Famke protested.

  “Try down the street. There’s a branch of the Methodist Ladies’ Mission eight blocks away.”

  “I have money—I need only the proper—”

  But she had tried the clerk’s patience too far, and the door slammed in her face with a clash of the little brass bell.

  It was the same everywhere in that district: No store wanted to assist in transforming a Chinese servant into a white woman of uncertain identity. The city was large and established enough that a number of clerks considered themselves too refined to cater to prostitutes, and that was all they imagined Famke could be. Thus it was not until she wandered into Bush Street, a district with a fair number of theaters and performance halls, that Famke found a shopkeeper willing to help her.

  Hearing her story, the woman’s well-lined face settled into an expression of willing sympathy, and Famke nearly wept in relief.

  “Isn’t that just shameful!” her benefactress exclaimed. “Celestials robbing a lady of her clothes! A body reads about such things every day, but without expecting it ever to happen to oneself. Now, how much do you have to spend?”

  For three dollars Famke bought a black-and-white plaid skirt, and the rest of her money was good for a pair of simple shoes, a lawn blouse, and the cheapest gloves and stockings and straw hat in that very cheap place. She even bought a set of stays, though Albert did not like them, because she had seen no white woman in the streets going without. She did not have enough to pay for the corset, but the woman was willing to come down in price, and even threw in a ten-cent box of handkerchiefs for free.

  “You look like a regular girl now,” she said, pulling a handful of pins from her own topknot and arranging Famke’s hair for her. “There’s a lovely color to your cheeks. And you’ll remember this place—Mrs. Iovino’s, near the Thalia Festival House.”

  “I will remember,” Famke vowed; she was so grateful that she really thought she might do more business here, as long as she remained in San Francisco.

  “I’ll even dispose of those nasty old clothes for you,” Mrs. Iovino volunteered, and Famke was glad to leave them to her.

  A few hours after Famke left, when the secondhand dealer made his weekly visit, Mrs. Iovino offered him the Celestial costume. He was so impressed with the quality of the materials that it was no trouble to get twice the price of a corset.

  Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, eight bits fuckee. . . Bu
ndle in hand, Ancient Jade tottered into Hygiene, wondering what she would do from now on to support herself. The walk that had taken Famke an hour had required the better part of the morning from her, even though she had traveled not by the road but as the crow might fly, straight through the trees. She was forced to pause frequently to rest her feet. During one of those pauses, Ancient Jade had looked down at the broken, sweaty stumps the Chinese called lotus blossoms, and she wished that if her feet had to be deformed, they might have been made into hooves, like the zebras’—or perhaps like the deer’s, for weren’t those cloven? These tiny feet had made her valuable to the slave traders who’d bought her from her widowed mother (who had pretended to Ancient Jade and the neighbors that she was traveling to Golden Mountain to be married), but they made real travel impossible. It was small wonder she’d spent six years trapped in that crib, calling, Two bits lookee, four bits feelee . . .

  Ancient Jade gathered up her determination and looked around for something to do. She saw the sign at the Springs Hotel: NO UNACCOMPANIED BLACKS OR CELESTIALS, and it caused her to shake with another wave of anger. It was perhaps that anger that, all afternoon, made her seem sullen and intractable even to the low rooming houses and laundries that might have been willing to hire a crippled Chinese girl-of-all-work without references; and thus, when the sun went down, Ancient Jade found herself without a roof or a means of employment.

  There was a sign posted in the little park as well—NO VAGRANTS—but Ancient Jade was not sure what that word might mean, and in all that afternoon she had not seen a single man of the law. Perhaps Edouard Versailles had not found time to hire any such men, as the village would not be officially settled until the hospital admitted its first patients. So Ancient Jade sat on that bench, straight-backed and holding her bundle, until the twilight faded and black night swallowed the park. There were globes for gas light, but Versailles had not ordered them lit as yet, either.