“I can’t feel like this anymore. I need to feel something different,” I told him. He looked down at me and over at the bed, as if to say that it was the marriage bed and we would be doing it under her nose and nonsense like that, and I grabbed him by the collar, my two fists under his neck, and whispered, “Right here right now. I don’t care about her at all.” I ran my fingers down his cheek with one hand, and, with as much confidence of possession as if I were in my own house reaching for a comb in a dresser drawer, I unbuttoned his fly. He raised my skirt and my petticoats, and put his palms under my bare thighs, and lifted me onto the edge of the bed. “Hurry,” I said, reaching between my legs to guide him. With that my work was over. It was all up to him now. I felt sleepy and helpless. My movements were feeble. Taking me beneath my shoulders, he dragged me roughly farther up the bed. He seemed to realize that tenderness didn’t fit the occasion. I wanted to feel his weight on me. He stretched me out flat and pinned my arms to my sides.
When we were done, we lay content for a long time; at last I asked, “When is she coming back?”
“An hour, maybe.”
“Precious hour,” I said, resting on his chest. After a while I said, “Is this the first time she’s gone out? How often does she go out?”
“Now and then.” He thought for a moment, then said, “She has just one fixed appointment, on Wednesdays, for a séance across town,” and, guessing my thoughts, he added, “Phoebe goes with her. One o’clock. Back by four.”
“It isn’t easy for me in that attic, Jeptha.”
“It isn’t easy for me down here,” he said.
So after that our time was Wednesdays between one and four. We had our fun, and we lay and talked—we talked about Charley and Agnes and Lewis. We talked pretty freely, but still there were things I kept from him, and I was sure he knew that.
ONE DAY, WHEN JEPTHA WAS OUT and I was reading by candlelight, I heard footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later Agnes and Phoebe stood in the doorway. “We were wondering if you would like to join us in a spiritualist experiment,” said Phoebe.
The three of us crept backward down the stairs. We came to the kitchen, where a small round table had been put in place of the larger rectangular table where we had our meals. When I had last seen this table, it had been covered with oilcloth. Now it was bare. Around its perimeter, inlaid into the oak, were pieces of a darker wood shaped into the numbers “o” through “9,” the letters “A” through “Z,” and the words “Yes” and “No.” In the center of the table was a heart-shaped board equipped with little casters so that it could move around the table when our hands were on it.
“This is a talking board,” said Agnes. “Before we begin, there is something I want to say to you, Arabella.” She turned her melting eyes toward me, and my stomach clenched with my old hatred at my first, deadliest enemy, who had never offered me a token of kindness that was not the envelope of a secret poison. “Phoebe knows what it is. I have confessed to Phoebe. I have told Phoebe about our childhood in Livy.”
“Have you,” I said, smiling, with inappropriate lightness.
“I have,” she said. Her emphasis admitted that I had a reason to be skeptical.
“I am not sure I want to discuss this,” I said. “I would love to hear from Charley, or to have word of my brother Frank, my father, my mother, but I’m afraid that if we talk over old times we will quarrel. I doubt they will put me in a receptive frame of mind.”
“That is why we must clear the air. While we are still in the body. I think we ought to try. Arabella: do you remember the day some of us thought the world was going to end, and we sat around the fire, and my mother wanted us to confess and apologize to each other, and I used my turn to accuse you rather than to confess, and you said, ‘Agnes, can this be, that you really think that Jesus is about to come and take away the saved and leave the rest to burn, really believe it, and yet you are using the occasion to add to the calumnies you heap upon me’? Do you remember that?”
“I remember thinking that; I don’t remember saying it.”
“You did say it.” She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. “You said it and you were right; I did believe it! I really did believe that the world was coming to an end and almost everybody in it would be tortured forever, and I could not stop myself from damning myself, as I thought, by slandering you, when I had already slandered you so criminally, when I had already done everything I could to ruin you!”
Her voice shaking, she kept looking at me and then looking away, looking around as if to seek help. Phoebe, touching her arm, said, “Agnes, perhaps not all at once. More when you are feeling stronger.”
“Phoebe, this will help me; let me go on. Arabella, let me do it now, what we were supposed to do on that day in 1844, let me really do it. I don’t know if we can ever be friends. It is too much to hope. The debt lies heavy on me. I can never do you a good turn that would equal it. I could give you Jeptha, but what is that when I no longer want him myself! It seems almost a fresh insult for me to ask your forgiveness—I have no right to your forgiveness when I have done so much to turn your life away from the path it should have taken, and I have only myself to blame. I was such a proud girl, Arabella. I told myself that I hated you because you were wicked, but it was really because you were the first girl I had ever encountered who possessed a force that was stronger than mine; I feared that if I let you be my friend you would rule me, and I could never brook being ruled by anyone.”
“You were religious. Weren’t you ruled by God?”
“I chose a ruler who lived far away, as I thought, so that I would not have to submit to anyone here. And I kept God far away: I never felt anything like grace.”
There was more; she admitted what she had always denied, never asking my forgiveness outright, but making her need of it plain.
At last I said, “Agnes, you must give me time. I perceive that you have changed and that you are sincere, but I think it will take a long time for my feelings about you to change. You’ve known the new Agnes for years; I’ve only known her a few weeks.”
She bowed her head. “It is more than I hoped for.” When she looked up, she put her hands on the talking board. “We can begin. If you feel up to it.”
“Yes. All right.”
With the help of her little machine, we had our séance. There was gibberish, which Agnes said might be an ancient language or a language from some other planet. Then the spirit of Philippe Toissante announced itself, saying that he was happy in the Summer-Land, and Jeptha should not trouble himself about his death. (He often visited, said Agnes, but Jeptha would not believe. Jeptha would not be comforted.)
Charley did not speak to us.
We put the oilcloth back on the round table and replaced it with the long table and ate a meal—whether in the company of incorporeal spirits, I cannot say. A few hours later, Jeptha came home. He had been to the post office, and the catch included an envelope with no return address, but it was in Lewis’s handwriting. Inside was a letter sheet, one of a series produced in those days whose illustrated side glorified the actions of the Committee of Vigilance. The picture was of a supposed “Mass Meeting Endorsing the Acts of the Vigilance Committee.”
On the reverse, in Lewis’s handwriting, was this:
Jason Babcock
William Bagley
Richard Boggs
Herbert Corothers
Edgar Dent
Andrew Gray
Robert Gray
Eugene Howard
John Hubbard
John Lyon
Henry Teal
Michelle, while pinned by a man who kept his hand on her mouth, had heard a voice saying, “Let her yell, Andy.” That must have been Andrew Gray.
I was happy he was dead, but I couldn’t be happy that it was Lewis who had killed him. I hoped fervently that he had the sense to lie low now. If he had been careful and gotten Gray when he was alone, and not left a piece of rope in his mouth, there was a chance th
at the other men did not yet know there was an assassin on their trail. If another died, they would suspect they were in danger. A third would erase all doubt, and they would begin to take precautions.
After dark, whenever there were noises in the house, my heart beat faster, for I hoped that it was Lewis sneaking in; he would be wet and bedraggled, I would scold him for the risks he had taken, and he would answer all my questions. But he did not come, that night or any other night. With each newspaper Jeptha brought home, my pulse would race until I had scanned its columns and made certain that it did not contain news of Lewis’s capture or death. At last Jeptha began to arrive home having performed this chore himself; I would hear him on the stairs and anxiously interpret his face during the second before he said, “Nothing about Lewis.”
The Bulletin reported that Andrew Gray, a wheelwright, had apparently hanged himself from a rafter in an empty warehouse. He was married with two young children.
Another letter sheet came to the post office. This one showed the vigilante 756 infantry and field pieces pointed at the entrance of the Plaza Market, headquarters of opposition to the committee, and was entitled: “Complete Triumph of the People! Exciting Events of Saturday, June 21st, 1856.” On the writing side of the letter sheet, in Lewis’s handwriting:
Jason Babcock
William Bagley
Richard Boggs
Herbert Corothers
Edgar Dent
Andrew Gray
Robert Gray
Eugene Howard
John Hubbard
John Lyon
Henry Teal
Agnes lent me a book from her library, Geography of the Spirit World by James Victor Andersen, and I read it, the better to understand Agnes and because I had time on my hands. I found much to admire in Mr. Andersen’s vision of the universe, and especially in his account of an afterlife in which the deceased, like wounded soldiers brought to a hospital behind the lines of a terrible ongoing war, were gradually healed—a process that might take more time than they spent in the flesh. No one was damned. They all came with various burdens, and slowly, tenderly, they were helped. When they were ready, they moved on to other, unknown, higher spheres. Oh, it ought to be like that! If only it were true!
I assisted Agnes and Phoebe with household chores. Sometimes I cooked meals in the kitchen, and Agnes and Phoebe kept me company there, busy sewing or knitting. On a day like that, when Jeptha was out of the house, Agnes remarked casually that she thought Jeptha, at least until recently, had been unfaithful to her. “He used to go out of town every two weeks. He was secretive about it. I think he was seeing a woman.”
Phoebe, knitting, nodded. “There’s no doubt of it.”
I would say they spoke as if of a stranger’s infidelity, but there was actually even less disapproval than that. I watched the tips of Agnes’s needles repeatedly sliding and separating like the heads of two whispering gossips while I considered and discarded several replies and at last, after too long a delay, settled on, “Oh dear, Agnes.”
“I’ve upset Arabella,” said Agnes to Phoebe. “Cousin, we mustn’t blame Jeptha too much. Nature has given him strong masculine urges, which I am no longer able to satisfy. I become pregnant easily, whatever precautions I take, and then, every time, I lose the baby, and it is like a great hammer, it crushes me to bits, and I am months putting myself together again; and always after this reassembly we see a piece or two lying about and we don’t know where it goes. I can’t let it happen again. I can’t, and … I am human, but my urges have never been particularly strong.”
She raised the knitting up to examine it. “I no longer believe in the institution of marriage.” She began again: slide and separate, shifting the little loops of yarn. “I don’t believe that men and women should be in bondage to one another. Swearing eternal fidelity is romantic, but impractical, for everything is change, as the philosophers tell us, and you can’t dip your hand into the same river twice. We must permit those we love to change, even if it means they grow away from us. And I think, for love to last, there should be no pecuniary dependency of one upon the other. Dependency poisons love. It is true, as long as women are so poorly educated that they cannot make money, men will have to take care of them. But I can’t regard these arrangements as satisfactory. I believe we should reconsider them.”
LXIII
GLUED INTO MY SCRAPBOOK ARE FOUR PARAGRAPHS from four different newspapers; they report the official dissolution of the Second San Francisco Committee of Vigilance on August 18, 1856. To be extra careful, I stayed at Jeptha’s house two days longer before creeping quietly out, after dark, with Jeptha as my escort. He took me as far as Portsmouth Square, and I walked the rest of the way alone. It was a delight just to feel the wind on my face. I walked to my house, turned the key, and opened the door, hearing small creatures scurrying away. When I investigated the next day, I found that rats had broken into sacks of flour and sugar in the kitchen. Two ground-floor windows had been forced open. The wine, whiskey, and perfume were all gone. The sheets had been stripped from several beds. Someone had defecated on a carpet and urinated on a pile of dresses that had been dragged out of the closets apparently for this purpose. It was unsystematic, and looked like the work of petty thieves and young boys.
Lewis joined me about a week later. All the people who had been sought by the vigilantes could come out of hiding, because none of us were wanted for any crime; we had been hunted merely as undesirables by men who held themselves superior to the law. I immediately began to rebuild my business. Though the vigilantes and the men whose election they supported had made a great noise about closing the gambling houses and the brothels, this never happened. We continued our operations, paying different men for protection.
On a sunny day one year later, I went down Montgomery Street in an open barouche with several girls who had come to me from New York and New Orleans. On my left was Georgette, who was slender with a childlike face. Men who enjoyed soiling purity appreciated her, yet under her doll-like exterior she was a careful girl, conscious of the dangers of her profession, determined to be an old woman one day. On my right was Suzette—the very one I mentioned at the beginning of this narrative, who was to take poison in a Five Points dive some years later. In those days, she had such a tiny waist that she would not have worn a corset if it had not given men such pleasure to see her in it. She gave good value in bed and was a gold mine for me, and was excessively generous to any invalid, bum, or other girl feeling blue. She grew angry only at injustice, and even then forgave readily. When I suggested that she ought to withhold more of herself, she agreed vehemently, like a drunk swearing to give up the bottle come next Monday, and I foresaw everything, but there was nothing I could do except be glad I wasn’t like that. In the backseat were Jocelyn, Michelle, and Francesca (or, as we also called her, Mrs. King), each splendid in her own particular way.
Men on the wooden sidewalks tipped their hats, leering, sighing, gawking. I wore black, with a lace veil. My girls wore white and held parasols. Rosy-cheeked, as sweet as cream, as fresh as flowers: ordinary men could dream of one day being able to afford them, as you might hope one day to live in a Venetian palazzo. The barouche slowed. “Girls, all of you, stand, smile, keep your balance.” We rolled down the street like a float in a parade. “Behold, you citizens of Sodom! Look, you misshapen gnomes and hunchbacks. This is beauty. This is why you must become rich.”
Children followed us. From a basket at my feet I showered them with little bags of zanzibars, candied almonds, and polished pennies.
Snarling wives snapped at their men and curled up the corners of their lips, showing purple gums and sharp dog-teeth. “Hello, you crones and charwomen!” I wagged my finger. “How good you are, how hard you labor, and for nothing, nothing! How life mistreats you. But you like it, don’t you? Do you scrub floors? Would you like to come to our house and scrub the floors? And wash our clothes? They need a lot of washing, these white clothes.”
As we ne
ared the Bulletin offices, I said, “Girls, sit down, all except Mrs. King,” and when they had obeyed I asked loudly, “Has anyone here seen Thomas King? I owe him money. Where is Thomas King?”
People laughed. Everyone knew what I had done to Thomas King, James King of William’s younger brother. I had found out that his ex-wife, back in Baltimore, was a prostitute. It was true! Ned McGowan had published it in the Phoenix, the newspaper he had started in Sacramento City, and all the San Francisco newspapers except the Bulletin had picked up the story, whereupon, to almost universal delight, posters suddenly appeared all over town declaring that Belle Cora had offered a thousand dollars plus the price of the first-class steamship ticket to Mrs. King if she would be the new attraction at my house on Pike Street. Which was also true, and fortunately she turned out to be pretty.
I was still here: thriving, mocking my enemies, and making a display of myself in ways appropriate to a parlor-house madam. People spoke of it as Belle Cora’s revenge; but it was a paltry revenge. Men who had killed my Charley were in barbershops having their faces lathered, in opera houses applauding the show, at picnics tossing their babies into the air. If I had been able to murder them all I would not have hesitated, and I often imagined it; but I was not going to do it, any more than Jeptha was going to walk into the U.S. Congress and pick a fight with the man who had beaten Charles Sumner. Revenge on such a scale requires a specialist.
I BOUGHT A SMALL COTTAGE between Happy Valley and Mission Dolores. Jeptha and I would each of us separately make our way there on horseback. A miner had owned it before I did. There was a vegetable garden in the back, which a local man tended in exchange for most of the product, with manzanita in the yard and huckleberries growing close to the house. Traveling to and from the cottage, I dressed in trousers and a frock coat. I would arrive first and change into a house dress. When Jeptha came on his horse, I would be standing in the doorway like a wife. We met more often than we used to.
Belle Cora: A Novel Page 63
