Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  During the governmental investigations of the profits earned by the transcontinental railroad, the partners announced that the line was “starving.” This was somewhat belied by the wonders of their mansions under construction. In his California Street palace, with its fifty rooms, its seventy-feet-high glass dome and bay windows stacked like poker chips, Stanford likes to show off his orchestrion. This is a complete mechanical orchestra housed in a large cabinet. He also takes pleasure in demonstrating his aviary of mechanical birds. These are perched on the branches of artificial trees in the art gallery and operate by compressed air, opening their metal beaks to sing when the governor presses a button.

  Bierce considered my piece much too long. He was not interested in the death of the boy, Leland Stanford, Jr., nor the founding of Leland Stanford Jr. University as a memorial.

  He commented that I should leave irony to the ironists and satire to those who possessed a lighter touch.

  “Moreover, do not employ ‘moneyed’ for ‘wealthy.’ You might thus say ‘the cattled men of Texas,’ or ‘the lobstered men of the fish market.’ ”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  A messenger delivered to me a scented square envelope addressed in florid feminine handwriting. I admired the look of Mr. Thomas Redmond, Esq. as penned by Amelia Brittain in bold, elaborate copperplate.

  Dear Mr. Redmond,

  This is to inform you that since I am no longer in a situation of attachment, you are welcome to call on me at 913 Taylor Street if you are so inclined.

  Expectantly yours,

  Amelia Brittain

  PS I look forward to discussing with you my “shadow”! AB

  I presented myself at number 913 on a steep block of Taylor Street, a narrow, tall, bay-windowed house with the facade bisected by a porch furnished with a wicker settee, chairs and a table. Bilious stained-glass windows gazed out at me, and the late sun glinted on the cut glass of the door. A butler in a striped waistcoat answered my crank of the bell. He had pale hair combed in a pompadour, and eyes that looked straight through me to see the printer’s devil instead of the journalist. He held out a silver salver, upon which I laid my calling card, and disappeared.

  He returned to say that Miss Brittain was not at home and closed the door in my face. I retreated down the steps, and down Taylor Street off Nob Hill.

  In the Barnacles’ cellar I whaled the stuffing out of the buggy seat, panting and dusty.

  When I quit the Fire Department I had kept my helmet, for I loved it dearly, with the beaked eagle on the crown and its long beavertail; the crown made of gleaming black heavy cowhide, reinforced by strips built up into gothic arches, and the inside padded with felt. I still sometimes admired myself in the mirror, capped by its magnificence. Once I had been ambitious for the white and black of a Chief’s Aide’s hat, and even the white of the Chief himself. I was still stirred when I heard the fire bell of the Engine Company over on Sacramento Street, and often I hastened along to see the action.

  Today there was a three-alarmer on Battery Street. Pumpers and hose reels blocked the street, and arcs of shining water flashed against the sun. This was a warehouse fire, bales smoldering and flaming glimpsed through open gates. Next door was a narrow-fronted saloon with the dilapidated sign: WASHOE ANGEL.

  The Chief in his white helmet was directing the fight, yelling at firefighters scampering with their hose-laying. Out of the saloon appeared a slouch-hatted young fellow in an overall, struggling with a painting that must have been four feet by six. I had only a glimpse of the naked woman delineated. She was mounted on a magnificent white horse, her long golden hair artfully arranged to advertise as much as conceal her charms, the stallion with one foreleg raised and bent. It was the typical saloon painting, but more magnificent than most. The woman’s flesh, white as gardenia blossoms, seemed to illuminate that chaotic scene. Struggling with the painting, which seemed to be buffeted by winds generated by the flames and the arching sprays, the young man staggered up the street and disappeared into an alleyway. That vision of saloon female nudity moved me to start after him, but my way was blocked by the team of horses maneuvering one of the pumpers. And the Lady Godiva of the Washoe Angel disappeared from my ken.

  At Mrs. Johnson’s establishment in the Upper Tenderloin, I sat in the parlor waiting for Annie Dunker. Mrs. Johnson sat on the far side of the room, stout in shiny black, talking to a gray-haired man in a brown suit, to whom I had nodded politely in response to his nod, without a meeting of eyes. I lounged in an overstuffed chair looking out the window at the traffic of Stockton Street. It was early for callers, but Mrs. Johnson had always been friendly. She had a personal style of accepting dollars, folding them and with a sleight-of-hand slipping the bills inside her black cuff.

  Annie tripped down the stairs in her ankle-length shift, which revealed interesting swells and swales, and had a blue ribbon at the neck. She trotted to me, pushed me back as I rose and seated herself in my lap.

  “It’s been so long, Tommy!”

  She was a kitten-faced, dark-haired girl a couple of years older than I, who had worked in Albany and Chicago before coming to San Francisco. She squirmed in my lap for a moment before springing to her feet. We went upstairs arm in arm. In her room I sat on the bed and said I wanted to talk.

  “First or second?” she said.

  “Do you know who Beau McNair is?”

  “Everybody knows of him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everybody in the better places, I mean.”

  “Is there a redheaded Jewess he might spend time with?”

  “Rachel, at Mrs. Overton’s. My cousin’s there too.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Just that he is‌—‌very attentive, Tommy. The way you used to be with me.” She had a way of making a two-syllable word out of “me.” She giggled, rubbing her hands down her shift.

  “Can you find out about how he is with her? How he acts? What he says? Anything interesting?”

  “They don’t think he is that terrible‌—‌butcher!”

  “This is just for me to know. What he’s like.”

  “I’ll ask Lucille. I know Rachel is popular.”

  “Have you ever had a client who didn’t have a—” I pointed. “You know?”

  She covered her mouth as she giggled, shaking her head. “What would be the point, Tommy?”

  “Have you heard of anyone like that? He has to use a leather thing he strapped on. A dildo, I guess.”

  “Well, there are men that do that, Tommy. Old men that can’t get it up any more.”

  “This would be a young man.”

  She shook her head some more, looking puzzled.

  “Could you ask around about such a fellow? I’ll get some money.”

  “I’ll do it for you. Tommy. For you and me-ee.”

  “Anything you can find out will be helpful.”

  “Now?” she said, and with a swift motion stripped her shift off over her head. She stood there naked and posed like a garden statuette. I thought of her astride a white stallion and my breath caught in my throat.

  “You look grand,” I said. Although all I could think of was Amelia Brittain, there was no hitch at all in taking pleasure with Annie Dunker.

  11.

  MARRIAGE, n. – The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Aboard the ferry across the Bay, and on the train to St. Helena, Bierce and I discussed the murders.

  “Senator Jennings murdered Mrs. Hamon in order to rid himself of a threat of exposure and disposed of her after the manner of the Morton Street murders,” Bierce said. “I believe Captain Pusey knows it, knows more than we do in fact, but he has his own springs of action.”

  “His spring of action is how to get a hook into someone with money to fork over,” I said.

  “I believe Pusey’s game has less light than shadow.”
>
  I started at the word “shadow.” What did Amelia mean by her “shadow”? Surely she could have no connection with Morton Street. Her father had been on the Comstock, and the connection of his name with a conspiracy called “the English shuffle” fretted me like a pebble in my shoe. The idea of a “shadow” caused chills of anxiety to wash over me. But she wouldn’t have written of it so lightly if it had been serious.

  “It is the shame of the Nation that we do not have a Chief of Detectives we can trust,” Bierce said in a bitter voice. “A mayor we can trust. A governor. A president! If our lives must be led in distrust and contempt of all who govern us, it would be well to accept the fact. It is my burden that I cannot. It is an affliction to me that a moth-eaten old malefactor such as Collis B. Huntington keeps a hand in my pocket, and another on my reins. It is unbearable!”

  The Bierce two-story cottage faced south among pine trees that had dropped a brown carpet of needles. On a veranda were bicycles, a porch swing and a litter of baseball bats and mitts. Two boys of ten and twelve, in short pants and striped baseball shirts ran out to dance around Bierce, followed by a red-haired child in a blue jumper, who flung herself into her father’s arms. She was received with the first real enthusiasm I had seen Bierce evince toward another person. There was no question from their reddish fair hair and neat countenances that Day and Leigh were his sons, little Helen his daughter.

  Mrs. Bierce came out on the veranda, wiping her hands in a frilly apron. She was a dark-haired, smiling woman considerably younger than Bierce, with a classic straight nose, a long face and intense bars of eyebrows. She and Bierce greeted each other coolly. I liked Mollie Bierce immediately, maybe because of Bierce’s cynicism about marriage and women. The older boy, Day, followed Bierce to the veranda with a perfect mimicry of his father’s stiff-backed military gait.

  Mollie Bierce’s mother, Mrs. Day, was inches shorter than her daughter, with graying hair and Mollie’s straight nose turned into an aggressive beak, a ram of a chin, and an upper lip wrinkled like pie crimping. She had a way of moving toward a quarry splay-footed, as though in preparation for combat, halting too close for comfort and extending chin and nose like a challenge.

  If Bierce and his wife tolerated each other, Bierce and his mother-in-law did not. Mrs. Day demanded to know why Bierce had not brought Mollie down to the City for Senator Sharon’s reception. She complained that Mollie had no piano on which to practice.

  This conversation took place on the veranda, Mollie Bierce rolling her eyes apologetically at me. The three of them moved inside the house, where the clamor of Mrs. Day’s accusations continued. I set my bag down, took off my jacket and invited the boys to a game of catch.

  We spread out into a broad triangle on the pine needles and flung the ball into each other’s mitts. Leigh was not as strong as his older brother, who powered the ball with a nice acceleration of his wrist. Helen watched from the veranda, seated in the swing which she pushed with her feet against the rail, her red hair a bright stain on green canvas.

  At the supper table, with Bierce at the head, Mollie at the foot, her mother beside her and the children and me distributed, Mrs. Day said, “Will you say grace, Mr. Bierce?”

  “A toast!” Bierce said, rising. He held out his iced-tea glass down-table toward his wife:

  “They stood before the altar and supplied the very fires in which their fat was fried!”

  He was quoting himself.

  His wife flushed, as though he had paid her a compliment.

  “I suppose that is all the attention the Good Lord will receive at this table,” Mrs. Day said. “But you will come to church with us tomorrow, will you not, Mr. Bierce?”

  “No, madam, I will not.”

  “We will attend,” Mrs. Day said, trap-mouthed. “Your wife, and Day, Leigh and Helen. But you will not accompany your family?”

  “I am the sworn enemy of organized piffle, madam,” Bierce said. “Including Sunday-scholiasts and Saturday pietaries.” He served up meat patties and gravy, potatoes and peas, and distributed the plates.

  “And you, Mr. Redmond, are you also an enemy of religion?”

  “I am Roman Catholic,” I said. My response was as unsatisfactory as Bierce’s. Mrs. Day appeared to be girding for sectarian battle.

  “Momma,” Mollie Bierce said.

  “Is Roman Catholic like Mikey Hennesey?” Day wanted to know.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “It is as honest a collection-extraction system as any protestant Bible-thumping,” Bierce said.

  “Dr. Grove is a fine man!” Mollie Bierce said gently.

  “I’m sure he is, my dear,” Bierce said. “And well deserving of your tiresome panegyrics.”

  “Dr. Grove has a red nose!” Helen chirped.

  “Helen!”

  Bierce gazed at his wife with eyes in which I could discern no affection.

  “And you are a journalist also, Mr. Redmond?” Mollie Bierce said. Her darkly pretty face regarded me with her gentle smile. I thought of the constant diplomacy that must be called for, with her mother and her husband. There was a brother, I knew; the third of what Bierce termed the “Holy Trinity.” I thought of my father and my brother Michael and the bitterness of interfamilial contentions, more intense and thus more savage than those with no blood connection; like the ferocity of Federals and Confederates murdering each other on the Southern killing fields.

  I said I was an apprentice journalist, learning what I could from The Hornet’s Editor-in-chief and Tattler. I was always uneasy praising Bierce, for I knew he was absolutely aware of flattery.

  Mollie asked what I was writing now.

  I thought it best not to mention the Morton Street murders. “I have been inquiring into the Mussel Slough Tragedy,” I said. “There is some historical evidence that needs to be reconsidered.”

  “Those farmers were no better than Communists,” Mrs. Day proclaimed, ramming her jaw out at me. “When this nation no longer respects property rights we are on the road to perdition.”

  Bierce regarded her calmly and held his peace, comfortable with his conviction of the Railroad’s pervasive villainy. Now we knew that an enforcer from Virginia City, a connection of Nat McNair’s named Klosters, had been one of the sheriff’s deputies acting for the SP at Mussel Slough, and that the trials of the settlers in Circuit Court had been decided by Judge Aaron Jennings in every instance in favor of the Railroad.

  We managed to finish supper without more hostilities. I had time alone with Mollie Bierce when she was showing me to the spare bedroom, arms filled with pillows and a quilt.

  “I wish Mr. Bierce could relax more when he is here,” she said. “He is so busy in the City. When he comes home he brings his busyness with him, and by the time he can relax it is time to go back to that teeming life again. It can’t be good for him, Mr. Redmond.”

  She bent to place the pillows and the folded quilt on the bed, and plump the pillows, bending to her work and pushing strands of dark hair back from her face.

  “He is busy in many good causes, Mrs. Bierce,” I said.

  “I know that, Mr. Redmond.”

  After breakfast Day and Leigh badgered me to play ball again. This time I set up double-play practice. I lofted the ball or bowled grounders, to Leigh, who pegged to Day at second base, who hurled the ball to me at first, whereupon I tossed to Leigh again. The boys yelled with excitement as we pitched the ball around with increasing velocity.

  Bierce watched from the veranda. I thought he wished he were a father who could play ball with his growing sons, but he was not. He was a closed-in man with an affliction of hating oppression, fraud and sham, and a talent for expressing his indignation in print. He would never be a good father, nor even a decent husband, whether or not he was able to relax from the demands of the teeming City.

  Little Helen came outside and leaned against his leg, and he went back into the house with her. When Mollie Bierce called to the boys to dress for church, there was a good deal
of complaint.

  Mollie Bierce, Mrs. Day and the children trooped off to their Sunday duties, and Bierce and I went for a walk on the road that looped up the hillside above the town. I was in my shirtsleeves from playing ball with the boys, and Bierce left his jacket off as well, his concession to country relaxation. He carried a stick and batted at the weeds along the margins of the road, which narrowed and steepened as we mounted. It was a bright day with puffs of cloud drifting in from the coast.

  “This is Larkmead,” Bierce said, flourishing the stick ahead. “Lillie Coit’s estate.”

  Every San Francisco fireman knew of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, although her years as a fire-belle were before I had come to San Francisco. She loved firemen, had proved it as Lillie Hitchcock and continued to prove it after she had married Howard Coit. The grateful fellows of Knickerbocker #5 had awarded her one of their pins.

  I couldn’t fault her for wanting to wear a fireman’s helmet. I remembered once as a child so loving a pair of copper-toed boots my father bought me at Gus Levenson’s Store in Sacramento that I took them to bed with me. Maybe it was something of the way that Lillie Coit loved the firemen of San Francisco’s Engine Companies.

  It occurred to me that Bierce had been looking for her when he led me up this trail into Larkmead, and there she was, in a clearing with a horse trough, standing beside a splendid bay with his muzzle in the trough. She wore a yellow-brown dress of many layers and flounces, and a broad hat heaped with feathers. She was a rather stout little woman of about Bierce’s age, with a round, friendly brown face which lighted up as she swung toward us, waving her riding crop.

  “Halloo Brosey!” she called to Bierce.

  They embraced. I was introduced. The coldness that had hardened Bierce’s features within the bosom of his family had melted in Lillie Coit’s company. The two of them sat on a downed log, gossiping and laughing, while I paced the clearing gazing out over the treetops into blue distance. I was not included in their conversation, and I felt ill at ease as I patted the horse and paced some more and seated myself and looked down at my shoes.