Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  Then we talked about the men. We clucked over their deaths, too. Jim had been hanged. Bill had been shot. When we knew them, they had been incredibly young. Still, one couldn’t help noticing that on the average even the most violent of the violent, reckless men we knew of had lived longer than most of the light girls. Perhaps there was hidden evidence, but certainly on the evidence known to us it was more hazardous to be a prostitute than a gunslinger. We cried over that.

  Enjoying ourselves thoroughly, we reminisced about the parlor houses, saloons, and dance halls—which ones were still open, which had changed their names, which had become Chinese wet-washing factories or been demolished to make way for the houses just reduced to ashes by the fire that had turned us into refugees, and we cried over those places, too, and wondered what had become of the characters who used to frequent them.

  Finally, we talked about our lives since then. I told her of my travels and my marriage. There was no way to hide the fact that I was very well-off. When it was her turn, she said she had married a miner and had been a good wife to him, and he’d been pretty reliable, although he had an irritating habit of saying, when drunk, that he didn’t regret marrying her—no, sir—though all his friends told him he was a fool to do it. He had been dead for twenty years now. They’d had five children, scattered to the winds. She had invested everything in the boarding house. She’d owned the building, not the land; now she had nothing.

  “We’ll stay in touch now,” I said, “and I’ll help you.”

  “Well, of course you will, Mrs. Andersen,” she said, with a hideous grin wide enough to show, more than our previous conversation, how completely she’d ignored my advice about her teeth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Say it outright.”

  “I know who you are, and you will have to make it worth my while not to tell everybody.”

  “Oh, my dear,” I said. “Oh, Antoinette. Aren’t you ashamed? Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I take you out of a Stockton Street dance hall, where you were entertaining a dozen men a day in your sad ignorance of your own worth, and give you a home in the best parlor house in the city? Didn’t I loan you money at no interest for your wardrobe?”

  “Yes, but never mind.”

  “And teach you which fork to use for shrimp? And give you a French name and French lessons to multiply your earning power? Didn’t I get you out of a fix now and then? Never mind all that? Remember a name I used forty-odd years ago, but forget all that?”

  “That’s beside the point. I can’t afford to gamble on your charity in my position. Look at you, with three servants, a house on Nob Hill—”

  “Not anymore.”

  “And fire insurance and bank accounts, and God knows what—stocks and bonds, and houses. You’re headed to a hotel in Sacramento. You’re rich! Richer than ever. You’ve always treated yourself grand, and you’ve always been sharp with a dollar, except for that one time with Cora. And you’re respectable. They wouldn’t let you near that hill, even with all your money, if they knew who you used to be, and I’ll tell them if you don’t treat me right.”

  We sat staring at each other. Finally, I asked, “You know what I was just about to do, Betsy?” That was her real name. I never heard anyone grant her the dignity of “Elizabeth”; it was always “Betsy” before it was “Antoinette.” “I was about to give you the address of my son, Frank, who lives in a splendid mansion behind an iron gate, you know, just outside San Jose. He would set your silence at a higher price than I would, because he has business interests you could damage. I was going to give you his address, and telephone him about you and let you bring him your story.”

  She waited for me to go on. When I didn’t, she inquired irritably, with an undertone of disquiet, “What do you mean? You were going to, but you changed your mind?”

  “That’s right, because I’m sentimental about you, Betsy, and he’s such a ruthless man. No, it’s all right, you needn’t be frightened.”

  She put a hard look on her face. “You can’t frighten me.”

  “Are you sure you’re not frightened?” My tone was kindly, as though I had her best interests at heart. “You look a bit frightened.” I put my hand over hers. She flinched and tried to jerk the hand away. I held it. Neither of us was strong.

  Mrs. Flynn, who had been watching from a distance of four or five yards, began to approach us. I waved her back.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Betsy, calm yourself.” I shifted my grip to her wrist. “I don’t want to see you hurt just because the fire unsettled you and made you say things you don’t mean. You’re no blackmailer. You don’t have the nerve. Your pulse is fast. I bet it’s faster now than it was during the earthquake. This is scarier. That was running away from danger. This is heading into danger. Can you do something so new, at your age? I don’t think so. It’s too late. Right?” Seconds passed. “To delay your answer so long is as much as to agree, Betsy.”

  I released her hand, and she stood up.

  “Where are you going, Betsy?” I asked. “Don’t run away. It’s too late to run.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “You can’t bluff me.”

  “Betsy, Betsy, Betsy. Who’s bluffing?”

  She sat down again and began to weep, a poor weak old woman. I was glad. I didn’t want to hurt her.

  Since then, I have kept track of Betsy, not that I am afraid she may reveal my secret—she won’t—but simply so that I may have the benefit of her memory when I want it. I have decided to write a true, full account of my life, which I’ve spent nearly half a century concealing.

  Why do it? Why now? As I said at the beginning, the earthquake and fire contributed to my decision, with Harriet and “Antoinette” each doing her part to remind me that I have a lot of explaining to do. There are many crimes on my head, some known to history, others that will be revealed only with the publication of this book. I mean it to be a complete confession, which means, naturally, one with excuses, without which no confession is complete. I invite your judgment, reader.

  I write these words sitting in a rattan chair on the balcony of the Belle Vista Hotel in Sacramento. I used to have a parlor house only a few blocks from here, with a winding staircase and a grand piano. How refreshing it feels to write that. The Belle Vista is a mediocre hotel. Its location, once semi-rural, is now a busy commercial district. Over the pedestrians’ heads, only a few yards from where I sit, the electric wires of the streetcars crackle with alarming white and blue sparks. But I have always found crowds soothing, I am immune to noise, and my money gets me special treatment here. Janet, becoming less a lady’s maid and more of a private nurse as time passes, has a room adjoining mine. Flo is in the kitchen to direct the preparation of my favorite dishes. I have moved in my furniture—choice pieces I was able to salvage—and my keepsakes, and a firm new bed from a downtown department store. Mrs. Flynn has her own room on my floor and runs errands and keeps me company. I enjoy the conversation of the drummers of sundry goods that patronize this class of hotel. Drummers will talk to anyone, and, whatever they may say to each other later, they never look skeptical when you tell them that once you were a great beauty and really (you lean forward, your reedy voice drops), really rather fast—no, it’s true!

  The San Francisco where I’ve lived so long, the golden city in which I delighted and suffered, that made me rich, adored and pampered me, and finally took it in its head to demand that in the name of decency I leave it forever so that it could become respectable, is gone utterly, never to return. A new one will be built, but who knows what my condition will be by then? I’m not likely to resume the life I had before the fire, nor do I wish to. My thoughts keep turning, half against my will, to that other, long-buried life, to the New York City of my childhood, to the pious black-clad merchants who patrolled the First Ward docks distributing tracts with titles like Happy Poverty and Deleterious Consequences of Idleness and Dissipation to men who could barely
read; to the mother we all knew would die, the father whose name I could not for many years speak; the farm and village where I found an implacable enemy and a lover whom I lost and regained; and the parlor house where my illusions were stripped away—but not quite all of them, even then.

  I think about these things, wishing I could send my thoughts back through the long line of my life like electricity through telegraph wire, all the way to my childhood self, to advise the little girl and the young woman. I lean forward in my chair. Do this, not that, trust this one, not that one, I want to tell her. My experiences have made me into a schemer; even in reminiscence I plot and contrive.

  If it is a harbinger of mental decay that on some days it all seems realer to me than the Belle Vista Hotel, that is all the more reason to begin now, before the shadows gather. Every full-length history of the city contains some misshapen account of my story here, but they don’t know it from the inside, and they certainly don’t know the whole story. They don’t know what brought me here. I want that told, at least after I’m dead: and this won’t be published until then.

  Those are my own selfish purposes for writing this book. Why anyone should read it is another matter—and here I have changed my mind. Over the years my hypocrisy has become so habitual that I was about to say something false: that, though my autobiography must touch on indecent matters, its effect would be moral. It would strip away the cheap glamour that flatters vice, and also the well-intended concealment that leaves frail young creatures unwarned and unprotected, etc. I don’t really think that way. That’s not the way I am made. To tell people how to behave in regard to any matter that does not immediately touch my interest is simply not in my nature. Whether some books corrupt people and others fortify them, I don’t know. Perhaps they do. It is a matter of indifference to me. I just want to tell what happened.

  * * *

  * Frederick Funston, “How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco,” Cosmopolitan, July 1906, vol. 41, no. 3. —Ed.

  I

  THERE IS A STORY ABOUT A GIRL who took the wrong path, and rues it all her life. She is too trusting. She is too passionate. The result: an error than can’t be corrected, a stain that can’t be washed out. Back on the old homestead where she grew up, no one is permitted to speak her name, and her picture is turned to the wall.

  Gentlemen love this story, so when any girl in a house of mine lacked some version of it I would help her to make one up. I’d take her to a good restaurant at a quiet time of day, order something very expensive, and tell her, “You were an Ohio farm girl, and to help your folks out with the bank loan you went to work in a mill. The mill agent’s son noticed you. He was very handsome. That was your downfall.”

  Or I’d begin, “You’re from a fine old Baltimore family. Your father was a good man, except he was a bit reckless: he gambled; he was killed in a duel.”

  And so on. There was a time when I had three girls declaring in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence that they were the daughters of clergymen.

  Why it was useful to say these things, I can only guess. God knows it wasn’t to evoke pity. We weren’t beggars, and the customers weren’t softhearted. The important thing was that it worked. We knew from experience that these men paid more for the attention of a girl wrapped in the fiction that she had not chosen this life—she was unlucky, meant for something better, but here to enjoy thanks to her misfortune.

  Sometimes we lied even though the truth was perfect. The pretty creature would run a fingertip along the rim of her glass and tell me, “I was a farm girl, but in Indiana,” or “There was a boss’s son, and a child, it did die, I did try to kill myself.” I’d inquire, “Do you ever tell them that?” She’d answer, “No.” I’d say, “Of course not: it’s too personal. But since it resembles what they want to hear, tell them something else along those lines. That way everyone’s happy.”

  The truth was withheld only because so much else had to be forfeited. My case was like that. I was the country girl. And before that, I was the rich girl.

  TO BEGIN WITH THE FIRST STORY, I was born in 1828, into a family of pious Yankee merchants. My grandfather, a silk importer, had come to New York from Massachusetts fifteen years earlier and had prospered. He owned what was for several years the tallest building in New York City. My father was his chief clerk. My mother was an invalid, and we prayed every day that she would live and knew that she would die.

  Our home was in Bowling Green, a fashionable New York City neighborhood a little past its prime. Its fine three-story buildings, with their pitched roofs and neat rows of dormer windows and wrought-iron fences, were being refashioned to live second lives as boarding houses, or being torn down entirely and replaced with hotels. I think it is because I was born there that the world has always felt old to me. The United States was young. Newspapers constantly reminded us of that. But in Bowling Green things showed signs of long use. I remember when a flood on the second floor of our house damaged a wall of the sitting room on the floor below, revealing many old layers of wallpaper, in quaint patterns, and my father told me that they had been pasted to the walls by the people who had been here before us, and deeper layers had been put there by the people who were here still earlier. How remarkable: there had been other families, surrounded by fleurs-de-lis on yellow, before that by pussy-willow twigs on green, and so on, layer on layer, back and back. Digging in the courtyard, I would find children’s lost whip tops and penny dolls. Who were these children? Where were they now?

  One still saw pigs in the streets, and when I look back now, their freedom to roam the nation’s leading commercial city seems like proof that the United States was only half civilized; but I didn’t think so, since I was a child, with no basis for comparison. So far as I knew, there had always been pigs on Broadway, along with carriages and omnibuses. It had all been there before me, in the era of fleurs-de-lis, in the era of pussy willows, forever. And if new houses were rising on new streets to the north, that, too, had been going on for ages, and no one knew how much longer it would be permitted to continue. The world would end soon, according to several upstate New York ministers.

  One of my earliest memories is of the time my mother lost me on the docks; she used to make a story of this episode, stuffed with morally fortifying lessons, like all her stories, so that I remember some of it from her point of view. She left my brother Lewis in the care of the hired girl and took me to Pearl Street. It was an ambitious journey: for months, the most she had been able to manage was a trembling descent of the stairs and a brief constitutional in the park across the street, with frequent rests. Now she was feeling better, glad to be out again, strong again—maybe all better, cured by some miracle?—and she walked, testing herself, one step and then another, with a fierce secret joy, gripping my hand, all the way to the docks.

  Since it was so long ago, I must explain that she was misbehaving—women of her class were not supposed to go to the waterfront, certainly not on foot—but my mother wished to investigate a dry-goods store known for its quality and reasonable prices. She did it with the pretext of visiting my father at his place of business. (As she explained later, she overreached herself, stepping out of her sphere, and she was punished for it.) We bought hot roasted peanuts from a pushcart. While she was talking to a clerk, I wandered out of the store and crossed the street to watch some children of the poor who lay facedown on the edge of the dock. They were holding a yard of cheap cloth beneath the water. I remember that the reflections of pilings, ropes, and masts wriggled like worms, with the children’s faces seemingly contained in the cloth. Abruptly the picture disintegrated; the boys’ arms were webbed with the river’s slime, the cloth dripped, tiny fish writhed. I turned to speak to my mother; she wasn’t there. I didn’t know which of those many doors I’d come out of and had no idea how to find it.

  To my left were the wooden ships, a bewildering thicket of masts, with vines of ropes and leaves of reefed sail, pigeons sitting on the yardarms, bowsprits drawing undulating li
nes of shadow on the cobblestones. To my right were three- and four-story buildings, many signs, doors and awnings—horses, wagons, dogs fighting over shreds of offal, men pushing wheelbarrows, heaving casks, spitting in doorways. I ran through all that in elemental terror, shouting “Mama! Mama!” until, with a sudden pressure beneath my arms, a man with brown teeth and rum breath, in a coarse-woven dirty shirt and pants with suspenders picked me up. He held me high, walking, while I kicked at his head. “Who lost a babe? Lost! One babe!” A little later: “What am I bid for this fine babe?”

  “That’s my child! Thank heavens—oh, thank you, thank you,” cried my mother, who moments before had been picturing my body fished lifeless out of the water, and I was handed down to her so quickly it was almost falling. Her grip, much weaker than the rough man’s, was tighter than usual for her. I could hear her quick heartbeat and wheezes—she had been running—and I did not feel entirely out of danger yet. I sensed her fear of this man, the kind of man our family considered a good object for home missionary work. When other prosperous merchants were rewarding themselves with a convivial midday libation or the comforts of home, my grandfather, accompanied by my father or one of his clerks, was busy spreading the word of God, as they believed all serious Christians should do, whatever their regular professions. In combed black hats and immaculate somber suits, they patrolled the waterfront, distributing Bibles—gripping calloused hands, saying, “Take this, sir, and may God bless you,” while peering into the eyes of sailors and dockers unaccountably not reached by the Gospel after eighteen hundred years.

  The next part I remember is walking up a flight of wooden stairs to the second floor of my father’s workplace, which was lit partly by gaslight and partly by slanting shafts of sun from the big windows. Junior clerks sat on high stools before inclined desks, scratching out lists and letters, while my father watched from a high platform that afforded him a godlike view of their labors. When he greeted my mother, the more astute clerks removed their short-brimmed high black hats, and the others followed the example. He took me from my mother, kissed me, handed me back. He said that he was happy that she was feeling stronger, what a surprise, and she must never do it again, and then he turned to one of the clerks and told him to stop what he was doing to take us home in a company wagon.