Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  The mansions of the magnates began to loom around us, facades lit by moonlight.

  “What was the trouble between Mr. Bierce and Miss Coolbrith?” Amelia inquired.

  “He gave her niece’s poems a savage review.”

  “Her niece should not have sent her poetry to him. He is infamous for his savage treatment of poets.”

  “A word of praise from him would be important. You remarked how those young ladies flocked around him.”

  “Are they all poets?”

  “I’m sure a number of them are. Miss McLachlan is a poet.” And I told her that she herself had been the most beautiful woman in that place.

  She laughed and squeezed my hand. “You just think that because you like me, Tom. I am so happy that you would think that! But there were two very handsome and very accomplished women there. I am not accomplished at all!”

  I said I wasn’t sure she should want to be as accomplished as Gertrude Atherton.

  Amelia was silent for a long time, as though considering that. “She is very pleased with herself,” she announced finally. “She is a wife and mother who is contemptuous of women who are wives and mothers.” And she added, “She said a curious thing.”

  “What is that?”

  “She said California girls are as flavorless as the pistachio. Doesn’t that seem an odd thing to say?”

  “Is the pistachio so flavorless?”

  “That is not what I mean. She must have known that most of her auditors were California girls. What is the point in telling us we are flavorless?”

  “You said she was pleased with herself.”

  “Who is herself a California girl. But I am sure she considers herself an uncommon one.”

  We walked on.

  “I think I would not be that way,” Amelia said.

  I did not inquire her meaning. In the moonlit dark, scuds of fog drifted seemingly close enough overhead to reach up and touch. Down a block I could see the hulk of the McNair mansion, a line of first-floor windows alight. Beau must be there, unless he was abroad on his “researches,” the idea of which angered me as much as Joaquin Miller’s pretensions.

  To the left the moon gleamed on the high smooth planking of Charles Crocker’s spite-fence, another Railroad outrage, and a project Bierce had assigned me that I hadn’t begun to work on yet. I berated myself that I would think to recoup being scared off of Senator Jennings by scarifying Charles Crocker.

  Amelia said, “I would have neither the presumption nor the courage to send verses I have written to Mr. Bierce.”

  I said carefully that I would be pleased if she would give me her poems to read. Again she was silent for a time.

  “I do not think I will do that, thank you,” she said finally, and it seemed best not to disagree with her. “Tom,” she said, “I think you must be very careful not to become like Mr. Bierce.”

  “Yes,” I said, and she gripped my hand in her strong hand. The street steepened beneath our feet. Below and on the right ahead of us were the high gables and the lighted windows of the Brittain house. Amelia halted.

  “If you wish to kiss me you must kiss me now!”

  I kissed her lips. Embracing her affected my knees, kissing her my breath.

  “That was very nice,” she whispered, as we continued our descent to 913 Taylor. When we climbed the stairs a figure rose from a chair on the porch, the constable on duty, raising his helmet in salute to Amelia.

  “All safe and quiet on the premises, Miss Brittain,” he said.

  He retreated down the porch while I bid Amelia good night. “It was such a lovely day for me, Tom,” she whispered. When she turned away I saw by the light through the window that her face gleamed with tears.

  23

  PILLORY, n. – A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction‌—‌prototype of the modem newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  On Monday morning Bierce was not in his office. The chalky skull gaped at me as I seated myself at my desk. I heard the approaching hard rap of footsteps. It was not Miss Penryn, but a woman in a tweedy, country jacket and skirts, and a tight-fitting cap sporting a pheasant feather curved over her forehead like a sickle. It was Lillie Coit.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Coit!” I said, jumping to my feet.

  She squinted at me out of her brown, freckled face, frowning, then producing a smile. “Oh, it is Mr. Redmond. Bierce’s not here?”

  “He hasn’t arrived yet, Mrs. Coit.”

  She moved inside the office to seat herself in the spare chair beside Bierce’s desk. She did not sit with her ankles crossed, but with her feet planted eight inches apart in sturdy brown shoes.

  “Are you a friend of Bierce’s, Mr. Redmond?”

  She was gazing at me with her mouth pursed and her eyes intent. It was a serious question.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I am his friend also. And what a talent he has for quarreling with his friends! What a talent he has for former friends. If I tell him what I have come to tell him, I am afraid that I will become a former friend.”

  I had seen Bierce quarreling with a former friend last evening.

  “Yesterday I saw Mollie Bierce and the children in the village,” Mrs. Coit said with a sigh. “That is a very unfortunate situation.” She leaned forward toward me.

  “Mr. Redmond, Bierce likes to boast that no one, man or woman, has seen him in the buff. Are you aware of this curious source of pride? I know he was wounded in the War. Can you tell me if his wound is such a disfiguring one that he would not want even his wife to see him‌—‌bare?” I thought she had colored slightly, but her face was so sun-browned it was difficult to tell.

  “He was wounded in the temple, at Kennesaw Mountain.” It was all I knew.

  She tossed her head with a commotion of the pheasant feather. “Might a head wound then explain his difficulties with friends?”

  I said, “He takes certain matters very seriously, Mrs. Coit, and is apt to give his opinion seriously. I know he has recently lost a friend by an overly honest review of the poetry of a relation.”

  “Ina Coolbrith,” Lillie Coit said, nodding. “How he loves poet-baiting. Let me tell you this, Mr. Redmond. His philanderings are too well known.”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “If one is unfaithful to a spouse,” she went on, “one does everything possible not to advertise the fact so as not to cause unnecessary pain. That is simply decent manners.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “I do not take Mollie Bierce’s part, you understand. But if he is so contemptuous of her and her family, why did he marry her? He is causing her unnecessary pain.”

  “I know that he has a number of women friends,” I said.

  “Young man, those are not friends, those are mistresses. They are a very different thing.”

  I felt my own face burn.

  “He will lose her,” Lillie Coit said. “Perhaps that is his intention.

  There are certain men who like to boast that they are not the marrying kind, as though this makes them a more admirable member of their gender. But he will lose more besides. He will lose his children. I know he loves that girl child, and the older boy‌—‌Day. Mr. Redmond, I see Bierce, if he does not change his ways, losing his friends, losing his wife, losing his children. I shudder to think of his declining years. What can be this inclination he has to destroy every association he has of love or friendship?”

  “Mrs. Coit,” I said. “In the quarrel that I spoke of, his former friend spoke of him as a disappointed man.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you not understand that, Mr. Redmond? He is a terribly disappointed man. He should be a great personage. He should be a writer of international fame. Instead he is merely a local poet-baiter and Railroad scold. He is mired in satire. This City, the West! has caught satire like a disease! He sees that Mark Twain has broken free of it. Mark Twain has found h
is heart, but Bierce cannot find his. He is a bitterly disappointed man.”

  I said I was sorry to hear her say this.

  “I can say it because I consider him my friend, but I wonder how long it will be before there is a quarrel, or a pretext resulting in one.

  “This is what I have come to tell him,” she went on. “And I cannot describe how relieved I am that he is not here. I wonder if you would be able to convey my fears to him, Mr. Redmond?”

  “I cannot,” I said. “I am only his associate. I cannot presume to advise him. He would not wish to feel he had been judged.”

  She batted at the end of the pheasant feather, as though it had interfered with her vision, and rose.

  “I’m sure that is true,” she said. “It is a shame, however.” She departed in her sudden manner, with her hard quick steps on the flooring of the hallway.

  When Bierce came in, walking briskly, he slapped his hands together and insisted that I accompany him to the Palace Hotel for oysters and eggs. I told him that Mrs. Coit had stopped in to see him.

  “Ah,” he said. “I am sorry I missed that lady. There was a lady last night I wish I had missed.” It was all he was to say about the quarrel at the Overland Monthly salon.

  The Palace Hotel breakfast specialty was served from a sideboard in a mahogany-paneled room illuminated by skylights. Bierce and I sat at a marble-topped table with our yellow mix of oysters and scrambled eggs that I was not sure my bruised stomach was equal to. Bierce pitched right in. I had a sense that he did consider me a friend, as though being coshed, threatened and beaten up by a Railroad gang had proved my value to him. But not a friend who could advise him on the conduct of his life.

  I told him of my bargain with Klosters, and the reasons for it.

  “I told you once that I had never been intimidated by the Railroad,” he said coldly.

  It would be easy to find a pretext to quarrel with him, as Mrs. Coit had told me.

  “I think your researches into Senator Jennings’s past may have served their purpose,” he said, relenting.

  “Maybe so.”

  “So Klosters understood that you would not shoot him,” he said. “His advantage is that one does not know whether he would or would not shoot.”

  I had Bierce’s revolver in my pocket, as though it had attached itself to me, and I was presently to have employment for it.

  Revolvers had played their part in San Francisco hard feelings. A man named Kalloch who was running for mayor on the Workingman’s Party ticket was the target of Charles De Young’s invective in the Chronicle. In a fracas with De Young, Kalloch was wounded. Later on his son shot De Young dead. And Bierce had acquired his own weapon when the husband of an actress he devastated in Tattle threatened him with violence.

  All this crossed my mind when I recognized Senator Jennings from Fats Chubb’s caricatures in The Hornet. He marched across the room toward us, a round-faced man with a cropped reddish-graying beard and a sweat-gleaming bald head. He was preceded by a belly so large he appeared to be carrying a bass drum under his vest. Trotting anxiously behind him, in a frock coat, was a hotel functionary.

  Jennings had a booming senatorial voice and he halted ten feet away from our table to shout, “You are a liar and a calumniator, Bierce!”

  I rose with my napkin in my hand, but Bierce remained seated behind his plate of oysters and eggs, his napkin tucked into his collar and a nettled frown on his face.

  “You are a Goddamned liar and calumniator!” Jennings boomed.

  Bierce said calmly, “And you, sir, are a footboy of rogues, a menial of thieves, a lackey and lickspittle, a knave, a blackguard, a sneak, a coward. And a murderer!”

  “Now, Senator,” the hotelman said. “Now, Mr. Bierce.”

  “Damned liar!” the Senator shouted.

  Bierce shoveled in eggs and chewed. He said to the hotelman, “This murderer’s adiposity is casting a shadow on my eggs that I fear will turn them rancid. Will you remove him?”

  “Oh, Mr. Bierce,” the hotelman said.

  Senator Jennings produced a derringer from his pocket and leveled it at Bierce.

  “Oh, Senator Jennings,” the hotelman said. “Please, not in here, sir.”

  I took Bierce’s revolver from my pocket, where its presence had asserted itself.

  Bierce pushed his plate aside as though it had indeed been fouled. “You have produced a firearm. Senator Jennings. Is that the argument with which you presume to assert your innocence?”

  I made sure that Senator Jennings saw the revolver pointed at his big belly. “Are you aware of the Concealed Weapon Ordinance, sir?” I said.

  His hot eyes fixed on mine. “And who are you, my man?”

  “My name is Redmond.”

  “You are Clete Redmond’s son, who has written a scurrilous piece about me.”

  “Yes, sir.” I did not see any reason to tell him that I had been intimidated by Klosters. Perhaps he already knew of it.

  The hotelman interposed himself between Jennings and Bierce. He pushed Jennings’s hand holding the pistol down, muttering soothing exclamations. I returned Bierce’s revolver to my pocket.

  “Bierce, I have the means to make your life miserable, and short,” Jennings said calmly. “And I intend to use them.”

  He lumbered off. Bierce motioned to the waiter to remove his plate as I seated myself again.

  “We will send these away as they are quite cold,” Bierce said. He rose to stride to the sideboard and load another plate with eggs and oysters from the gleaming steamer there.

  I had a sense of layers of menace laid over us like blankets on a bed.

  “Apparently he is not yet aware of your capitulation to Klosters,” Bierce said.

  When we had left the Palace after our repast, he said grimly, “I would give the devil his dues if he would provide me with the evidence I need to bring that podgy homicide to the bench of justice.”

  24

  ROMANCE, n. – Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Sgt. Nix propped his helmet on the desk beside the skull, shaking his head as Bierce told him about the encounter with Jennings at the Palace Hotel.

  “He’s too big for the captain to go after,” Nix said. “You’d have to have a squad of ministers swearing on a carload of Bibles that they saw him strangle Judge Hamon’s widow.”

  “Any word from the daughter in San Diego?” Bierce asked.

  “She and Hamon didn’t get along. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Tom’s been nosing into Mammy Pleasant’s past history,” Bierce said.

  “Those’re tolerable high-power Nobs that used to play those games out at Geneva Cottage,” Nix said, shaking his head again. “Course we always knew what Mammy was. Do you know how many abortions a month it takes to keep a crib going? Cowyards and parlorhouses? They’ve got some kind of pessary thing soaked in quinine and some herbs that makes them barren for awhile, but it is still abortions mostly. And was back when Mammy Pleasant was in the business. There’s always midwifes around, but she was the only one for the Nobs. Abortions and baby-furnishing. No one ever went after her for any of that. This is San Francisco. There has been funny business at the Bell house too. But they say she and Allan Pinkerton was pals from the days when she had to do with the Underground Railroad. Captain Pusey is tolerable careful with her. I’ve noticed.

  “They say she’s in court every day. Right in the middle of things too. Sarah Althea and her lawyers having a confab at their table, she’ll stick her black head right in the middle of it. Of course she is paying the bills. Miss Hill and her new lawyer’s a couple of turtledoves, I hear. I expect some of that’s for Sharon’s benefit.”

  There was some discussion of Sharon v. Sharon, which seemed to be going Sarah Althea Hill’s way at the moment.

  Bierce asked if Beau McNair was in custody or out.

  “Out,” Nix said. “His mother’s on hand. Got in last n
ight.”

  “Now Captain Pusey will spring his trap,” Bierce said.

  “Let’s see what you have on Mammy Pleasant,” Bierce said, when Nix had gone. I brought him the typescript:

  Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in San Francisco in 1853, a passenger on the SS Oregon. Also aboard was a young Scotsman named Thomas Bell, and a long-standing connection was formed. Mrs. Pleasant was a quadroon who could pass for white and did so in a San Francisco that was more interested in handsome women than in distinctions of color. It may be that she knew of some crime or aberration in Thomas Bell’s past, because she has kept a rein on him as his fortunes flourished in San Francisco. She was renowned as a chef and was passed from kitchen to kitchen among the aristocracy of Rincon Hill and Nob Hill. It was said that she could command a cook’s wage of $500 a month, with the stipulation that she wash no dishes.

  In the employ of wealthy men she found a role as an organizer of elaborate parties, with the service of beautiful females she always seemed to know how to procure. In the late ‘60s she operated a prosperous house of assignation where the Bonanza kings were often to be found: William Ralston, Darius Mills and William Sharon, as well as Thomas Bell, who had become a financier of considerable means. In 1869 she opened a Pleasure Palace at the junction of the Geneva and San Jose Roads called Geneva Cottage. Parties were limited to ten; the fee was $500. Financiers, politicians, bankers and mining kings visited Geneva Cottage for stag parties. A popular amusement was a game of Nymphs and Satyrs, with Nymphs shedding garments as they fled into the darkness of Geneva Cottage’s park, and aging Satyrs puffing in pursuit. There were rumors about harsh treatment of the girls, and at least one troublesome Nymph dropped from sight. Such rumors were not pursued by the police because of Mrs. Pleasant’s connections.

  In the ‘70s she purchased a new “boardinghouse” at 920 Washington Street, where the opening revels were presided over by Governor Newton Booth and his Secretary of State, Drury Malone. William Sharon, William Ralston and Nathaniel McNair were on hand for the event.