Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  She had not come to the park by accident; Ancient Jade allowed as little room for chance in her life as possible. She was here because during her search that afternoon she had heard, thanks to long habits of invisibility that made men speak freely around her, that this park was actually a den of prostitution.

  “The sweetest, whitest flesh you’ve ever seen, and completely healthy,” one sunken-chested man had whispered to another. “Like a Greek statue she is . . . Twenty dollars to touch, ten to look.”

  That was forty times what Ancient Jade used to earn in her crib, and she hadn’t been allowed to keep any of that. Reluctant as she was to whore again, this seemed like the best business prospect she would have here. She thought she might earn enough to rent a bed in a house for Chinese cooks and launderers; she could tell them she worked nights at the hospital. This was, of course, if the girls who already worked in the park would let her buy part of their business.

  The night stretched longer, and there were no other girls. Just Ancient Jade, sitting on her shadowed bench, so much a part of the shadows herself that when the first customer arrived he almost looked right through her and returned home in disappointment. But, sensing his approach, Ancient Jade turned on her old professional smile, the smile that had been beaten into her; and it lit a path straight to her feet.

  “Ten for look, twenty for touch,” she said. She made no other offers, calculating that if this man wanted something more he could damn well ask for it. She was also willing to come down in price, as the schedule she had heard was obviously for a white woman’s services.

  But this man did not argue; he saved his breath for the difficult business of breathing itself. He simply took out his purse and fished from it two heavy, beautiful golden coins. Ancient Jade smiled again, and this time the smile melted her clothes away. In the moonlight, her flesh was sweet and white, too.

  Chapter 53

  The street floors of the great avenues form one continuous exposition of all that art and science can produce. A pauper could enter these clothing stores and in a moment step out a prince, to the eye at least. [ . . . ] I could never have imagined women in whom beauty and charm are more general than in these.

  GUILLERMO PRIETO,

  A JOURNEY TO THE UNITED STATES

  Feeling free of some horrible prison—though her movements were much more restricted in these clothes—Famke set out to find the city’s painters. She had Hygeia rolled up in one hand, nothing in the other; for she had nothing else in the world. Yet with new clothes had come new hope, and she expected to find Albert momentarily. Perhaps she would turn a corner and run right into him; San Francisco seemed the kind of place where that could happen, and she was just hot and tired and feverish enough to believe that it would.

  Then she stopped short, forcing the foot traffic to curl around her with a few curses and jolts of the shoulder. She ran quickly through the checklist of symptoms that Edouard had impressed upon her: Feverish. Yes, but anyone who had spent a day and a half locked up in a third-class car would feel feverish. And under those conditions, anyone’s lungs would feel raw as well. No, she thought, and began to walk again, she would be better once she had some rest. Hygeia Springs had cured her, and she was going to have a long, happy life. With Albert.

  She remembered the eleven cents she’d found among the cushions, tucked furtively into her stays at Mrs. Iovino’s, and she stopped at a tea house for a glass of fizzy water and some information about art. She sat where the prettiest waitress would serve her and asked, “Have you modeled for the painters?”

  The girl blushed as pink as her dainty bodice and, after a little more teasing and prodding, told Famke about the Old Supreme Court House on Montgomery Street. It was full of artists sharing studio space where once lawyers and judges had tried to impose some sense of order. Or, if Famke merely wanted to look at paintings, there were galleries in Woodward Gardens and at the San Francisco Art Association on Pine Street. The waitress also recommended a place called the Bohemian Club, where artists congregated with writers, actors, and their “misses.” It developed that this last category embraced not failed works but the girls most intimate with the artists—girls of whom Famke had read long ago—and thus it was there that she made her first destination. The waitress drew her a map on a teahouse menu.

  Famke strode into the Club bravely, with six cents remaining in her pocket and the colors in her skirt already beginning to run together from her body’s humidity. She was immediately lost in a forest of plaster castings and gold-painted props, where paintings and drawings were as thick on the walls as scales on a flounder’s belly. In the midst of this artistic clutter stood men and women deep in conversation, laughing and gulping at their wine with a determination to be merry, to live artistic lives.

  “I am looking for Albert Castle,” she announced.

  If she had anticipated an immediate response, she was disappointed; the name appeared to be unfamiliar, or at least to excite no interest. The giddy chatter continued.

  Famke felt a rush of weakness and realized she had not had a thing to eat in over two days. “Albert Castle,” she repeated, less loudly, and looked for a chair in which to collapse. Finding nothing, she leaned against the wall and willed her ribs to expand beyond the corset, so the spinning and buzzing in her head would stop.

  “Meess?” A voice with a dimly familiar accent hissed somewhere around her collarbone. “You are unwell?”

  Famke looked down onto a brown head soaked with macassar oil, the smell of which rolled upward. “It is hot in here,” she said; finding better words, a compelling story, seemed like too much trouble.

  “You are perhaps ’ungry?”

  “Yes,” she said with relief, hoping this would mean food was about to materialize.

  It did not. “You are looking for work?”

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

  At last, the man waved at a girl with a plate of tired-looking sandwiches; with a chivalrous gesture, he handed over a nickel and tucked a ham-and-cheese into Famke’s hand. She tried not to tear at it too savagely or to think what she might owe this man for his gift. She did not want work; she wanted Albert. For now, she ate, getting crumbs all over her new gloves and wishing her benefactor had thought to buy her something to drink as well.

  “I am an arteestic entrepreneur,” he said, with that accent that she now identified as something like Edouard’s: French, but perhaps from a different part of the country. “I stage a variety of spectacles to please the eye. Arteestic young girls such as yourself—”

  “I am not looking for work,” she interrupted. The sandwich now gone, she untied the tress around Hygeia and unfurled the canvas. It fell over the length of her and across a few feet of floor; she saw the thickly painted areas had cracked. “I am looking for a man who paints this way. See, there is his signature—the castle in that corner. A. C. Albert Castle. Do you know him?”

  The little man studied the long picture carefully, looking from Hygeia to Famke and back again, then bending down to peer through his spectacles at Albert’s castle. “As a signature,” he pronounced at last, “it is fine. Yet as a painting, I may say—”

  “Oh!” Famke began rolling the canvas together. She was not going to listen to another unpleasant word about Hygeia. “I did not ask for a review. I asked for the painter.”

  Strengthened by the sandwich, she left the little man and dove into the crowd, boldly cutting into one conversation after another, asking after Albert. She met with sketchy success: A few men said his name sounded familiar and had been uttered recently in San Francisco, but no one could recall actually having met him.

  “He is tall and thin,” Famke said, as if through description she could will him into being. “He has green eyes like a frog. He paints enormous pictures.”

  But none of this information meant anything to the members of the Bohemian Club. “Are you a model?” asked one man after another, measuring her hair, height, and bone structure with their
eyes. “Or an artist?” the occasional woman added, clutching a shabby purse or a half-empty glass and blinking fiercely up at her.

  Famke stamped her feet impatiently. “I am looking for Albert Castle.”

  Famke enjoyed no more success at the Old Supreme Court House than she’d found with the Bohemians.

  “Not a Castle among us,” declared a hirsute young man on the ground floor.

  Famke recognized the feeble pun, but she continued to stare him down until he agreed to take her through the building. They knocked on locked doors and walked freely through open ones, inspecting canvases covered with fruit and flowers or decorously draped women; they spoke to artists in spattered smocks and models who cleaned their toenails when not required to pose. Their answers were always variations on a few themes:

  “Never heard of him.”

  “The name sounds familiar, but . . .”

  “Did he ever work in Colorado?”

  “Try the Bohemian Club.”

  Famke refused dozens of visiting cards offered by men who hoped to awaken her to her own potential as a model. She had no interest in posing for anyone but Albert, and she did not trust these avid young men in their beehive of art. The hirsute fellow was becoming what Sariah used to call “overfamiliar” with her, and she even thought she felt his hand on her waist as they climbed their third set of stairs. She ran the rest of the way up and stood panting at the top.

  “Keep soughing like that,” said her escort, “and you’ll sail away on the last of your own wind.”

  Famke leaned against the wall. She was tired and itched to be free of the corset, and she’d never realized how heavy a roll of painted canvas could be till she tried carrying Hygeia around for a day. She thought incidentally that poor Hygeia was no worse than the ugly French-style paintings she’d seen today; it was rude of these so-called artists to pucker up their noses and smile at it. She also wished she’d had the foresight to ask for a second sandwich. “This is not the last of my wind,” she said stubbornly, and she led the march down the hall.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “The name sounds somewhat familiar, but . . .”

  Eventually they exhausted the possibilities at the Old Supreme Court House. The sun began to sink, and Famke’s guide said he must return home to his wife. He pressed his card upon her and told her that, really, the painting she carried was not so bad. If she would ever like to pose for another, or learn some artistic techniques herself, she had only to call on him.

  As he disappeared into the moil of the street, Famke at last weighed up the ugly facts. Sometime during the afternoon her last coins had disappeared, and she literally had not even two cents to rub together; all she owned in the world was the clothing on her back and the painting in her hand. She had nowhere to spend the night, and she was cold now and hungry again. It was time to contrive something.

  She could not do here what she had done her last night in Hygiene; not only was it shameful, but it was too dangerous in this unknown place—and besides, there was a chance that Albert would hear of it. So she began to pick her way back toward Mrs. Iovino’s store, where earlier in the day she had noticed several pawnshops doing a brisk trade. The gas lamps glowed gently, lighting her path, and at the end of the street, the Thalia Festival House was lit like a red rose, with the letters on its poster bills glinting golden dewdrops. But Famke did not need to go that far; only Acropolis Pawn was still open, and she was its last customer.

  One final time she unrolled Hygeia and looked at the lines she had labored over, the delicate details, the whole truth of a woman’s body. After a brief discussion, she accepted six dollars (this for the canvas that had once fetched seven hundred!) and stuffed the limp greenbacks down into the tight corners of her corset, where they felt hot and dirty.

  “I will be back to redeem her,” she vowed, looking again at the painting that had filled so many hours of her life.

  “Sure you will, sister,” said the pawnkeeper, a second-generation Greek with a waxed moustache. “Just you keep hold of that ticket.” He twirled thoughtfully at one sharp point of hair, wondering where best to display the enormous, ragged thing.

  Chapter 54

  The San Francisco Art Association is a delusive title. Rambling through their rooms last week one would have noticed [ . . . ] contusions in black-and-blue, and ravings in yellow ochre; tropical horrors and dropsical Niagaras; several degrees of poisoned pup and some freaks in cattle. There were some paint which resembled flowers, and some still-life which resembled paint; some convalescent landscape, and some hopelessly incurable architecture.

  THE WASP

  Famke plunged into the San Francisco art world with both feet and her whole heart, clutching at anyone who might guide her toward Albert. At city prices, her six dollars lasted precisely three days, and even then she felt herself suffering from poor diet and a burst of unaccustomed physical activity, as she walked from the Bohemian Club to the Supreme Court House, from one gallery to another, attending public auctions of what those in the know called buckeyes and potboilers—in other words, hackwork—and looking for solid clues that did not appear. First she obtained a list of professional models from the Bohemian Club and visited them one by one. None of them knew Albert, either, though again a few called the name familiar. She allowed a tall New Yorker to serve as her guide for a day, riding the famous electrical cable cars up and down nauseous hills until it became clear he was leading her about for his own amusement, not for her benefit. She wasted another day trying to get into the classrooms at the San Francisco Art Association, where she thought for some reason Albert might be either teaching or taking classes.

  Famke could not give up the conviction that he was here somewhere. So she continued to dig and prod and try to survive until she had exhausted every possibility.

  One possibility came in the person of Miss Hortense Dart, an English lady artist who had come to this liberated city in order to take lessons and who was known for painting the fantastic castles of popular fairy tales. A spotty model mentioned those castles to Famke in a way that convinced her they were worth a try, though she was aware of grasping at straws and trying to turn them to gold.

  Miss Dart’s studio was at the top of a five-story building near the Woodward Gardens, where she caught all the sunshine that could squeeze its way through San Francisco’s clouds. She was cleaning brushes when Famke came to call, and the smell of turpentine poured hot and sharp out of her open door. Peering in, Famke saw a short, fleshy woman of about thirty-five, with once-dark hair and pale eyes above a rumpled smock; the smock’s neck was distorted by a goiter the size of a goose egg. After one look, Famke knew Albert would have nothing to do with this woman, however gifted and modern she might be. But Famke was tired, and Miss Dart offered quite calmly, as if hectic redheads presented themselves on her doorstep every day, “You look as if you could do with some tea. Shall I make a pot, Miss—?”

  “Summer.” It seemed too much effort to say the last syllable. “And a cup of tea would be very nice.”

  Famke sank down onto a hard chair. She thought now that the studio was really quite pleasant, small but clean, though with none of the clutter she had come to associate with artists’ dens. A Japanese screen stretched over the darkest corner of the room, and Famke wondered if it hid a bed that must be as chaste and spare as a nun’s—but a good deal more comfortable than the cot on which she herself lay at night, gritty-eyed from scheming and from the somnolent eruptions of the models with whom she shared a rundown room. Models, she had discovered, were no better than miners in a flophouse.

  “Here you are.” Miss Dart put a hot cup in Famke’s hand and pulled up a chair for herself. The liquid in her own cup looked even darker than Famke’s. “I like a really strong brew,” she explained, blowing into the cup to cool it. “I hope you weren’t wanting sugar or milk—”

  Famke shook her head.

  “They say we shouldn’t drink milk anyway, as it passes on the tuberculosis.”
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br />   Both women sipped. The tea tasted remarkably like Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound; or perhaps it was the turpentine in the air that made Famke think so.

  “Now,” Miss Dart said briskly, when she gauged Famke’s spirits to have strengthened, “what did you say I might do for you?”

  Once again Famke uttered the name that had become an incantation. “I have looked all over,” she added helplessly, anticipating another defeat, “and no one knows him. But I heard that you paint castles . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Dart, “I have met him.”

  Famke stared at her—the pale eyes, the salt-and-pepper hair, the hideous goiter. She thought she must have misunderstood. “Are you sure?”

  Miss Dart set her cup down in its saucer and put the saucer on a little table littered with paint tubes. “A tall man,” she said thoughtfully, “with light hair and green eyes? Who repeats the words one says to him?”

  Astonished, Famke gulped her tea and scalded her throat. Her breath came fast and hot, burning her lips. “Where is he?” she croaked.

  A veil of discretion fell over Miss Dart’s face. “Forgive me, young lady, but why do you ask?”

  The more Famke looked at this poor, ugly woman, the more far-fetched became the notion that she and Albert were somehow connected. And now she, Famke, was being called upon to explain herself. Which story should she tell? Should she portray Albert as deserting husband or feckless brother?

  “He used to paint me,” she said, and her hands shook so that she nearly overturned her cup of faux Pinkham’s. She noticed that the cup was a Flora Danica lily, and that started a flood of tears.

  “My dear Miss Summer!” Now Miss Dart was kneeling with both Famke’s hands in hers, chafing the rough thin fingers with her oily ones. “What can be the matter? Do you need money? Has he—forgive my frankness, but are you in a condition?”

  Famke laughed through her tears. “No, no, nothing of that sort!” In fact, her courses had ended, leaving her with a clean feeling as if she were all new Down There. She did need money, but this was hardly the moment to admit it. “I only want to—” Now the tears set off a spate of hiccoughs, which turned to real coughs, and she accepted a rainbow-stained rag with gratitude. “I only want him to see me!”