by Paula Guran
Seattle, Washington, 1899
You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells me.
Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.
Sure, fifty dollar’d be a year’s wages back in Hay Camp for a real seamstress, and here in Seattle it’ll barely buy you a dozen of eggs, a shot of whisky, and a couple pair of those new blue jeans that Mister Strauss is sewing. But here in Seattle a girl can pay fifty dollar a week and have enough to live on and put a little away besides, even after the house’s cut.
You want to work for a house, if you’re working. I mean . . . “sewing.” Because Madam Damnable is a battleship, and she runs the Hôtel Mon Cherie tight, but nobody hits her girls, and we’ve got an Ancient and Honorable Guild of Seamstresses, and nobody’s going to make us do anything we really don’t want to unless it’s by paying us so much we’ll consider it in spite of ourselves. Not like in the cribs down in the mud beside the pier with the locked doors and no fireplaces, where they keep the Chinese and the Indian girls the sailors use.
I’ve never been down there, but I’ve been up along the pier, and you can’t hear the girls except once in a while when one goes crazy, crying and screaming. All you can hear up there is the sailors cursing and the dog teams barking in the kennels like they know they’re going to be loaded on those deep-keel ships and sent up north to Alaska to probably freeze in the snow and die along with some Eastern idiot who’s heard there’s gold. Sometimes girls go north too—there’s supposed to be good money from the men in the gold camps—but I ain’t known but one who came back ever.
That was Madam Damnable, and when she came back she had enough to set herself up in business and keep her seamstresses dry and clean. She was also missing half her right foot from gangrene, and five or six teeth from scurvy, so I guess it’s up to you to decide if you think that was worth it to her.
She seems pretty happy, and she walks all right with a cane, but it ain’t half hard for her to get up and down the ladders to street level.
So anyway, about them ladders. Madam Damnable’s is in the deep part of town where they ain’t finished raising the streets yet. What I mean is when they started building up the roads a while back so the sound wouldn’t flood up the downtown every spring tide, they couldn’t very well close down all the shopping—and all the sewing—so they built these big old masonry walls and started filling in the streets between them up to the top level with just any old thing they had to throw in there. There’s dead horses down there, dead men for all I know. Street signs and old couches and broken-up wagons and such.
They left the sidewalks down where they had been, and the front doors to the shops and such, so on each block there’s this passage between the walls of the street and the walls of the buildings. And since horses can’t climb ladders and wagons can’t fly, they didn’t connect the blocks. Well, I guess they could have built tunnels, but it’s bad enough down there on the walkways at night as it is now and worth your life to go out without a couple of good big lantern bearers each with a cudgel.
At Madam Damnable’s, we’ve got Crispin, who’s our doorman and about as big as a house. He’s the only man allowed to live in the hotel, as he doesn’t care for humping with women. He hardly talks, and he’s real calm and quiet, but you never feel not safe with him standing right behind you, even when you’re strong-arming out a drunk or a deadbeat. Especially if Miss Francina is standing on the other side.
So all over downtown, from one block to the next you’ve got to climb a ladder—in your hoop skirts and corset and bustle, that ain’t no small thing even if you’ve got two good feet in your boots to stand on—and in our part of town that’s thirty-two feet from down on the walk up to street level.
When the water table’s high, the walks still flood out, of course. Bet you guessed that without me.
They filled up the streets at the top of town first, because the rich folk live there—Colonel Marsh who owns the lumber mill and such. And Skid Row they didn’t fill in at all, because they needed it steep on account of the logs, so there’s staircases up from it to the new streets, where the new streets are finished and sometimes where they ain’t. The better neighborhoods got steam lifts, too, all brass and shiny, so the rich ladies ain’t got to show their bloomers to the whole world climbing ladders. Nobody cares if a soiled dove shows off her underthings, I guess, as long as the underthings is clean.
Up there some places the fill was only eight feet, and they’ve got the new sidewalks finished over top of the old already. What they did there was use deck prisms meant for ships, green and blue from the glass factory on the north end, set in metal gratings so that when there’s light the light can shine down.
Down here we’ll get wood plank, I expect, and like it. And then Madam Damnable will just keep those ruby lamps by the front door burning all the time.
The red light looks nice on the gilt, anyway.
Our business mostly ain’t sailors but gold camp men coming or going to Anchorage, which is about the stupidest thing you ever could get to naming a harbor. I mean, why not just call it “Harbor,” like it was the only one ever? So we get late nights, sure, but our trade’s more late afternoon to, say, two or four, more like a saloon than like those poor girls down under the docks who work all night, five dollar a poke, when the neap tide keeps the ships locked in. Which means most nights ’cept Fridays and Saturdays by three we’re down in the dining room while Miss Bethel serves us supper. She’s the cook and barkeep. She don’t work the parlor, but she feeds us better than we’d get at home and she keeps a sharp eye on the patrons.
Sundays, we close down for the Sabbath, and such girls as like can get their churching in.
I don’t remember which day it was exactly that Merry Lee and Priya came staggering into the parlor a little before three in the morning, but I can tell you it wasn’t a Friday or Saturday, because all the punters had gone home except one who’d paid Prudence for an all-night “alteration session” and was up in the Chinese Room with her getting his seams ripped, if you take my meaning. The rest of us—just the girls and Crispin, not Madam Damnable—were in our robes and slippers, faces scrubbed and hair down, sitting in the library when it happened. We don’t use the parlor except for working. Beatrice, who’s the only one at the hotel younger than me, was practicing reading out loud to the rest of us, her slim dark fingers bent back holding the big ivory-bound book of Grimm’s fairy tales.
We’d just settled in with tea and biscuits when there was a crash down the ladder out front and the sound of somebody crying like her leg was broke. Given the sound of the thump, I reckoned that might not be too far from the truth of it.
Crispin and Miss Francina gave one another The Look, and while Beatrice put the ribbon in her book they both got up and moved toward the front door. Crispin I already said about, and the thing about Miss Francina is that Miss Francina’s got a pecker under her dress. But that ain’t nothing but God’s rude joke. She’s one of us girls every way else, and handy for a bouncer.
I followed along just behind them, and so did Effie. Though I’m young, we’re the sturdiest girls, and Effie can shoot well enough that Madam Damnable lets her keep a gun in her room. Miss Bethel kept a pump shotgun under the bar, too, but she was upstairs in bed already, so while Crispin was unlocking the door I went over and got it, working the breech to make sure it was loaded. Beatrice grabbed Signor, the deaf white cat who lives in the parlor—he’s got one blue eye and one yellow and he’s
loud as a ghost when he wants something—and pulled him back into the library with the rest of the girls.
When I got up behind Crispin, it was all silence outside. Not even anymore crying, though we all stood with our ears straining. Crispin pulled open the door and Miss Francina went striding out into that burning cold in her negligee and marabou slippers like she owned the night and the rest of us was just paying rent on it. I skin-flinched, just from nerves, but it was okay because I’d had the sense to keep my finger off the shotgun triggers.
And then Miss Francina said “Sweet child Christ!” in that breathy voice of hers and Crispin was through the door with his truncheon, bald head shining in the red lantern light. I heard him curse too, but it sounded worried rather than angry or fearful, so I let the shotgun muzzle droop and walked up to the doorway just in time to grab the arm of a pretty little Indian girl—Eastern Indian, not American Indian—who was half-naked and in hysterics. Her clothes had never been good, or warm enough for the night, though somewhere she’d gotten some lace-up boots and a man’s coat too big for her. All she had on else was a ripped-up shift all stained across the bosom, and I could tell she weren’t wearing nothing under it.
She was turned around, tugging something—another girl’s arm, poking out frontward between Crispin and Miss Francina where they were half-dragging her. Once they got both girls inside in the light, Effie lunged forward and slammed the door.
“Here, Karen,” Crispin said in his big slow molasses voice. “You take this little one. Bring her after. I’ll get Miss Merry here upstairs to the sickroom.”
Miss Francina stepped back and I could see that the girl between them was somebody I knew, at least by reputation. Not a girl, really. A woman, a Chinese woman.
“Aw, shit,” Effie said. Not only can she shoot, but Effie’s not real well-spoken. “That’s Merry Lee.”
Merry Lee, which was as close as most American tongues could get to her real name I guess, was half-conscious and half-fighting, batting at Crispin’s hands while he swung her up into his arms. Miss Francina stuck her own hands in there to try to hold her still, where they looked very white against all the red on Merry Lee’s face and arms.
Effie said, “She’s gunshot. I guess all that running around Chinatown busting out crib whores finally done caught up with her. You know’d it was sooner or later going to.”
“You hush about things you know nothing about,” Miss Francina said, so Effie drew back chastened like and said, “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Go and watch the door, Effie,” Miss Francina said. I gave Effie the shotgun. Effie took it and did, not sulking at all. Effie talks without thinking sometimes, but she’s a good girl. Madam Damnable don’t tolerate them what ain’t.
The girl in my arms wanted to get loose of me—she pulled away once and threw herself at Crispin, but Miss Francina caught her and gave her back, and honest she was mostly too light and skinny to put up a good fight once I had a grip on her. I tried to talk to her, tell her she was safe and we were going to take care of her and Merry Lee both. I didn’t think then she understood a word of it, but I found out later her English was pretty good so I think it was mostly that she couldn’t hardly have been more upset. But something got through to her, because after a minute of twisting her wrists and getting blood all over my good pink flannel she stood still, shivering, and let me bundle her up the stairs after Crispin and Merry Lee while Miss Francina went to fetch Miss Lizzie.
We followed them down the long rose-painted hall to the sickroom door. Crispin wanted to take Merry Lee in without the Indian girl, but the girl weren’t having none of it. She leaned against my arms and keened through the doorway, and finally Crispin just looked at me helplessly and said, “Karen honey, you better bring that child in here before she cries down the roof.”
She was better inside, sitting in a chair beside the bed while Crispin checked over Merry Lee for where she was hurt worst. Effie was right about her being gunshot, too—she had a graze through her long black hair showing bone, and that was where most of the blood was from, but there was a bullet in her back too and Crispin couldn’t tell from looking if it had gone through to a lung. It wasn’t in the spine, he said, or she wouldn’t have been walking.
Just as he was stoking up the surgery machine—it hissed and clanked like a steam engine, which was never too reassuring when you just needed a boil lanced or something—Miss Lizzie came barreling up the stairs with an armload of towels and a bottle of clear corn liquor, and I knew it was time for me to be leaving. The girl wasn’t going anywhere, but she didn’t look like interfering anymore—she just leaned forward in the bedside chair moaning in her throat like a hurt kitten, both hands clenched on the cane arms.
Crispin could handle her if she did anything. And he could hold down Merry Lee if she woke up that much.
I slipped through the door while Miss Lizzie was cutting the dress off Merry Lee’s back. I’d seen her and that machine pull a bullet before, and I didn’t feel like puking.
I got downstairs just as somebody started trying to kick in the front door.
In all the fuss, Effie hadn’t thrown the bolt, which should be second nature but you’d be surprised what you can forget when there’s blood all over everywhere and people are handing you guns. The good thing was that I had handed her the gun, and when the front doors busted in on their hinges she had the presence of mind to raise up that gun and yell at the top of her little lungs, “Stop!”
They didn’t, though. There were four of them, and they came boiling through the door like a confusion of scalded weasels, shouting and swearing. They checked just inside, staring from side to side and trading glances, and from halfway up the stairs I got a real fine look at all of them. It was Peter Bantle and three of his bully boys, all of them tricked out in gold watch-chains and brocade and carrying truncheons and chains along with their lanterns, and you never saw a crew more looking for a fight.
The edges of the big doors were splintered where they’d busted out the latch. So maybe they’d have broken out the bolt trying to get in anyway.
“I said stop,” said Effie, all alone in her nightgown in the middle of the floor, that big gun on her shoulder looking like to tip her over.
Miss Francina wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and I could tell from the sounds through the sickroom door that Crispin had his hands full of Merry Lee. Madam Damnable, bless her heart, was half-deaf from working in dance halls; she might have gone up to bed and even if Miss Francina had headed up to fetch her it would take her a minute to find her cane and glasses, which meant a minute in which somebody had to do something.
I didn’t think on it. I just jumped over the banister, flannel gown and quilted robe and slippers and all, exactly the way Miss Bethel was always after me about for it not being ladylike, and thumped down on the red velvet couch below the staircase.
I stepped off the couch, swept my robe up like skirts, and stuck my chin out. “Peter Bantle,” I said, real loud, hoping wherever Miss Francina had got off to she would hear me and come running, “you wipe your damn muddy feet before you come into my parlor.”
Now I ain’t one of the smaller girls—like I said, I’m sturdy—and Peter Bantle is like his name—a banty and a peckerwood—which is probably why he struts so much. I’m plump too—the men like that—and I’m broad across the shoulders, and when I came marching up beside Effie he had to look up to meet my eyes. I saw him frown a little on the size I had on him.
The three in front of him were plenty big, though, and they didn’t look impressed by two girls with a single pump shotgun between them. Bantle’s men had all kinds of gear hung on them I didn’t even recognize, technologics and contrivances with lenses and brass tubes and glossy black enamel. Bantle his own self had a kind of gauntlet on his left hand, stiff boiled leather segmented so the rubber underneath showed through, copper coils on each segment connected by bare wires.
I’d heard about that thing; I talked to a girl once he made piss
herself with it. She had burns all up her arm where he’d grabbed her. But I didn’t look at it, and I didn’t let him see me shudder. You get to know a lot about men in my work, and men like Peter Bantle? They’re all over seeing a woman shudder.
I don’t take to men who like to hit. If he reached out at me with that gadget, I was afraid I’d like to kill him.
He didn’t, though. He just ignored me, and looked over at Effie, who he could get eye to eye with. He sneered at her and through a curled lip said, “Where’s Madam Damnable?”
“She’s busy,” I said. Only reason I didn’t step in front of Effie was on account of she had the gun, but the urge to was that strong. “Me and Effie can help you. Or escort you out, if you’d rather.”
Miss Bethel would have cringed at my grammar, too. But right then I couldn’t afford to stammer over it to make it pretty.
Effie settled that gun on her shoulder a little better and lowered her eye to sight down the barrel. Bantle’s men looked unimpressed so hard I could tell they was a little nervous. One hefted his black rubber truncheon.
“You got one of my whores in here, you little chit, and that thieving outlaw Merry Lee.” Bantle’s voice was all out of proportion with his weedy little body. Maybe he was wearing some kind of amplifier in that high flounced collar of his. “I aim to have them with me when I go. And if you’re lucky and give them over nice and easy, my boys here won’t bust up your face or your parlor.”
Rightly, I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t my house, after all; Madam Damnable gives us a lot of liberty but setting the rules of her parlor and offering sanctuary to someone else’s girls ain’t in it. But I knew she didn’t like Peter Bantle, with his bruised-up, hungry crib whores and his saddle shoes, and since he had come crashing through the front door with three armed men and a world of insolence, I figured I had a little more scope than usual.
“You’re going to leave this parlor now,” I said. “And shut the door behind you. And Madam Damnable will send somebody around in the morning so you can settle up for the lock you busted.”
