Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Phillip Margulies

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © Killerton, Devon, UK / National Trust Photographic Library / Andreas von Einsiedel / The Bridgeman Art Library

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Margulies, Phillip, 1952–

  Belle Cora / Phillip Margulies. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53276-1 (alk. paper)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53277-8

  I. Title.

  PS3613.A7446B45 2013

  813′.6—dc23

  2012048554

  v3.1

  To Maxine

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword to the 1967 Edition

  Author’s Introduction

  Book One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Book Two

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Book Three

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Book Four

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Book Five

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Chapter LXIII

  Book Six

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Chapter LXVI

  Chapter LXVII

  Chapter LXVIII

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Tell me where, or in what land

  is Flora, the lovely Roman,

  or Archipiades, or Thaïs,

  who was her first cousin;

  or Echo, replying whenever called

  across river or pool,

  and whose beauty was more than human…?

  Where is that brilliant lady Heloise,

  for whose sake Peter Abelard was castrated

  and became a monk at Saint-Denis?

  He suffered that misfortune because of his love for her.

  And where is that queen who

  ordered that Buridan

  be thrown into the Seine in a sack?…

  where are they, where, O sovereign Virgin?…

  FRANÇOIS VILLON, CA. 1460

  FOREWORD TO THE 1967 EDITION

  Mrs. Frances Andersen had already been a New York City merchant’s daughter, a farm girl, a millworker, a prostitute, a madam, a killer, a missionary, a spirit medium, a respectable society matron, and a survivor of the Great San Francisco Earthquake when she began writing the book known to us as Belle Cora. She completed her final draft two days before her death in 1919, and the manuscript was discovered shortly thereafter in her Sacramento hotel suite, beneath a note that said, “Hear the will before you entertain any thoughts of destroying this.” As she had foreseen, the news of its existence came as an unpleasant shock to her heirs, who had had until then every reason to hope that their wealthy relative’s secrets would die with her.

  It would be difficult to overstate the delight the tabloid press of the 1920s took in the ensuing court battle, as famous in its day as the Fatty Arbuckle rape trial or the “Peaches” Browning divorce. Before it was over, Mrs. Andersen’s sanity had been posthumously challenged, her servants had spoken on her behalf, the character of her loyal amanuensis Margaret Peabody had been attacked, members of San Francisco’s most notable families had been subpoenaed, and the manuscript itself had testified to its author’s mental competence much as Oedipus at Colonus is said to have done for the poet Sophocles. Since the purpose of this campaign was to keep Belle Cora a family affair, it was self-defeating from the start; Mrs. Andersen’s book—its plot already boiled down to its essentials in girls’ jump-rope rhymes and West Indian calypso songs, its title known to streetcar conductors and immigrant fruit peddlers—went into five printings when published in 1926 in highly abridged form by the Dial Press. The full text was harder to obtain. Scholars wishing to consult it were obliged either to visit the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, or else to make wary use of the pirated version published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in the 1930s and smuggled into the United States in the luggage of sophisticated travelers. At last, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding Fanny Hill (Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413) prepared the way for this accurate, complete, and unexpurgated edition.

  In my role as a curator for the Bancroft collection and the author of separate monographs on the careers of David Broderick and Edward McGowan, both of whom walk briefly through the pages of Mrs. Andersen’s memoir, I have been fascinated by this remarkable document for years. When Sandpiper Senior Editor Morris Abramson asked me to edit the book and write the foreword, I jumped at the chance.

  According to the current legal definition, Belle Cora is not obscene. There is no question about the redeeming social value of this work, a primary source for anyone researching antebellum New York, the “Miller heresy,” the California Gold Rush, or its author, a significant historical figure in her own right; and with Victorianism’s eclipse, it no longer offends contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters.

  We are not all historians, however. It is fair to ask, now that the scandal surrounding its first publication is forgotten, and on drugstore bookracks the works of Genet and de Sade brazenly return our stare—now that we are permitted to read Belle Cora—why should we read it? For most of us the answer will be found in the spell its remarkable author, with her special brew of guile and honesty, is still able to cast
upon us.

  Like an old French postcard, Belle Cora has survived long enough to substitute other charms for its fading erotic appeal. Although Andersen, aka Arabella Godwin, Arabella Moody, Harriet Knowles, Arabella Talbot, Arabella Dickinson, Frances Dickinson, Arabella Ryan, and Belle Cora, was certainly a flawed human being, many readers have found her book as companionable as she herself was in her bloom (“Flaunting her beauty and wealth on the gayest thoroughfares, and on every gay occasion, with senator, judge, and citizen at her beck and call …”*). She was not entirely a novice when she began Belle Cora, having previously ghost-written two books credited to her third husband, and having published, under her own name, the considerably less candid autobiography My Life with James Victor Andersen. It is safe to say that nothing in those works prepared their readers for this one, with its pitiless scrutiny of matters concerning which her contemporaries maintained a systematic silence. Nostalgic without sentimentality, Mrs. Andersen has performed the feat of seeming modern to more than one generation. She speaks as clearly as ever across expanding gulfs of time, telling us what it was like to be in places long since obliterated, making the nearly impossible choices that most of us have been spared.

  Prior to the publication of her memoir, the general outline of Belle Cora’s moment in history was known through several multi-volume works on the subject of Gold Rush–era California, reminiscences by members and opponents of the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee, and a series of articles in the San Francisco Bulletin by the popular feature writer Pauline Jacobson. The more personal and private events of her childhood and adolescence in New York, as astonishing in their own way as those for which historians had remembered her, were unknown until these confessions appeared.

  In fact, it is one of Mrs. Andersen’s unintended accomplishments to have helped correct, just as it was coming into existence, a false impression given by many books and films about the Far West—the myth of a Western type, with its own accent and code of honor, a romanticization of the old-timers and third-generation Westerners encountered by the writers and filmmakers of the 1920s. It is too easy to forget that when the West was really a frontier most of its inhabitants were new to it. They met as immigrants from many distant points of origin, as ill-assorted as the crates of shovels, cigars, pineapples, mosquito nets, and upright pianos that landed on San Francisco’s chaotic shores in 1849. And they were also immigrants from another time, from decades of naïve piety, climaxing five years earlier in the bitter fiasco of Millerism, when people had stood on hills and rooftops waiting for Jesus to appear in the sky. Mrs. Andersen, in her eagerness to justify her actions, to explain how she became an immoral woman, gives us this Eastern background of the West.

  It is with pride that I present, complete in one volume, the confessions of the notorious widow of the gambler Charles Cora.

  Arthur Adams Baylis, Ph.D., New York, 1967

  * * *

  * Bancroft, Hubert Howe, Popular Tribunals, vol. 2. (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), p. 240.

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  My experiences in the April 1906 earthquake in San Francisco have led me to write this book, so I suppose I’ll begin there. When the first temblor came, I was in bed: it was 5:12 a.m. I was dreaming the dream I have had at least once a year for the greater part of my life, that I was an innocent farm girl in upstate New York.

  In this edition of the dream, my aunt’s hands were gripping my shoulders. Her husky voice implored me to wake up; there was work to be done. I kept my eyes shut, knowing very well that when I awoke I wouldn’t be on the farm. She didn’t understand that, naturally; she was dead. She kept shaking me. At last she pulled her arm back and struck me so hard she knocked my head against the wall, and the floor beneath us started to sway. I knew then where we really were. We were at sea, rounding the Horn.

  When I awoke, chandeliers were swinging. Precious objects in break-fronts tinkled, shuddering across the shelves; thick pillars and crossbeams split and snapped. I heard shouts, screams, and dogs barking.

  Feeling that any movement on my part might make the house collapse, I at first shifted only my eyes, and then turned my head carefully. The curtains had fallen from the bedroom window. I saw a patch of sky and the ornate scrollwork of the corner of the roof of the building across the street. I understood: Aunt Agatha had died long ago, my last husband more recently, and perhaps my turn had come. I’d resided in California too long to think that one big shock would be the end of it, or that there was anything to do but wait, saying goodbye: to my jewels, the house, the sky; to the sad remains of the body that used to concentrate the gaze of the crowd when I ambled down the street twirling a parasol.

  After twenty-five seconds, the second shock came. “Forgive me!” I shouted. My bed hit the floor. My back and neck hurt. The canopy top was lopsided. I guessed that a lamp, and maybe part of the ceiling, had fallen on it. I was sure that if I moved I would bring it all down on me. The window showed no roof now, only sky. I thought the building opposite had collapsed, but it was just that I was on the floor now, looking up.

  The vanity table teetered like a drunk looking for a safe place to fall, causing a slow avalanche of ivory- and silver-handled combs and brushes, mirrors, china pots, carved boxes, a playbill from the San Francisco Opera. They slid to the carpet; after a brief delay the table followed them, and a big oil painting came down and its frame split. There were more shouts.

  Soon I noticed that Janet, my lady’s maid; Mrs. Flynn, my housekeeper; and Gerald, my butler, were in the doorway. I saw their heads over the fallen dresser. “Well, help me up,” I commanded, surprised at the firmness of my voice. I was very frightened. With tense faces, they stepped carefully over and around the debris. Gerald, whose brow was bleeding, propped up the canopy, while Janet and Mrs. Flynn helped me to my feet.

  “It’s a miracle,” I decided, meaning that I could move at all. “Let’s go to the window. Thank you, I can walk by myself now.”

  My house stood on the highest point of California Street, in the best part of the town, and we could see for miles. To the eye not much was different: a few empty spots where there had been buildings only minutes ago; here and there a mighty pillar of smoke that brought to mind the Lord as He revealed Himself to the Israelites.

  Janet, who was not yet twenty, but was shaking as if she were in her nineties, tended to Gerald’s cut, while Mrs. Flynn and I went through the house to assess the damage. At exactly the same time, we turned to each other and said, “Flo.” Flo was my cook. We found her in her room, snoring, mouth agape, the beached immensities of her pale, mole-flecked body halfway out of her bed. A novel lay on its face beside a toppled dresser. Flo, I remembered, was fond of Dr. Armiger’s Wonderful Solution, a laudanum-spiked sleeping potion, and, to show Mrs. Flynn and, I suppose, myself that I was no longer afraid, I made a joke: “Florence Glynn, cook to the prominent Nob Hill dowager Frances Andersen, slept straight through an earthquake, thanks to DR. ARMIGER’S WONDERFUL SOLUTION,” I declaimed, while Mrs. Flynn shook Flo out of her stupor. “Surely YOU deserve sleep like this.” Her eyes opened.

  I thought it was over except for sweeping and dusting, and some funerals of strangers. I should have known better.

  The telephone was inoperative. I returned to my bedroom, Janet helped me dress, and we went out into the street, which was eerily quiet and filling up with the mighty of San Francisco: rail barons and traction magnates, real-estate moguls and silver kings, and their dependents. A goodly proportion of them were unshaven and half dressed or in their nightclothes, with their hair in disarray. They looked like children caught being bad.

  My club ladies lived in this neighborhood, rich women who occupied themselves, under my despotic supervision, with charity balls, the reformation of drunkards, the alleviation of slum conditions by means of forcible exposure to fine art. Each had her specialty. I found Constance in her front yard, looking like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, uncorseted, red hair loose, gripping an iron railing a
s if planning to cling to it should the earth move again. I found Harriet stroking the back of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and speaking to her in tones appropriate to a young child.

  “Mrs. Andersen, thank heaven you’re all right,” said Harriet—as I now know, insincerely. Harriet’s husband owned the Saint Francis Hotel, and at his insistence, several years earlier she had sent Jennifer away to the Reed School in Detroit, a school, according to its statement in the advertising pages of McClure’s, “for Nervous Children and Children Who Are Backward or Slow in Mental Development.” Jennifer wasn’t nervous: she was those other things, as anyone realized after two minutes in her company. She had to be watched constantly; she would cross the street in heavy traffic to inspect a steam shovel.

  “It’s a mercy,” I rejoined, and I asked after her family and servants. In the meantime, Eleanor and Grace, also clubwomen, came up to greet us. We embraced, too. I became very conscious that this morning there had been no baths, and no talcum or perfume, and in their place were pungent aromas of sweat and fear; my nostrils also conveyed the curious information that the feebleminded Jennifer had not soiled herself, but Eleanor had. I held her long enough to whisper, “You must change your clothes, Eleanor.” She flushed and whispered back that she was afraid her house would fall down. “Then use mine,” I hissed. “My house is sturdy,” I added, as if to say: I’m Mrs. Frances Andersen, the earthquake wouldn’t dare to topple my house. After a moment she obeyed me.

  Shortly after this, I recognized in the crowd Brigadier General Frederick Funston, acting commander of the army’s Pacific Division. I liked General Funston.

  “General—oh, General! What can you tell us? Have many died?”

  “Mrs. Andersen.”

  He was panting. I now know why, having just read his highly self-serving account of that day.* He had run all the way from his home on Russian Hill to Nob Hill, and then to the army stable on Pine near Hyde. After sending a message to the commanding officer of the Presidio to report with all available troops to the chief of police at the Hall of Justice, he had walked back to the top of Nob Hill, which was to the military mind merely high ground from which to view the action. He was a tubby little fellow with narrow shoulders, a button nose—cute on a baby, embarrassing on a man—and a well-trimmed mustache and tidy beard. I guessed that he would be important today, though I didn’t know how important.