Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  We bought coffee and pie being sold from the back of a wagon. By then it was evening. The gambling houses were open. Having paper- and canvas walls, they glowed all over like giant lanterns, and we used their light to find our way as the music from the different houses clashed in the festive discord heard today in carnival midways.

  A drunk staggered out of the El Dorado, throwing the door wide, and with this gesture, like a dimpled Cupid uncurtaining a bathing Venus, he laid bare a lavish world of gilt, mirrors, and crystal, voluptuous furniture, obscene oil paintings, young sirens in lace and muslin, every type of hat, cravat, and mustache, and lifetimes of toil rising in sinuous golden towers on the tables. It occurred to me that a Harriet Knowles could become rich very quickly in this unnatural city, where there was so much sudden wealth and the mere sight of a woman made men gasp in wonder. Though I looked on my former life as a disaster that had befallen me long ago, I could not control these thoughts about what could be done with the materials at hand. I thought this way automatically, as a man who had once been a cooper might look at a barrel and think, I could have made it better.

  We walked on. Jeptha put his hand over my eyes to spare me the sight of a man urinating in the street.

  WE SPENT OUR FIRST NIGHT BELOWDECKS on the Juniper, our second in a wood-frame lodging house in which a canvas curtain separated us from several men in the next room. On the third day, we moved into a permanently moored schooner formerly called the Flavius. Nailed to a short pole where the mainmast had once been was a large hand-painted sign, FLAVIUS FOOD AND LODGING. Its owner was Captain Austin, a Mexican War veteran who had bought the vessel, along with several water lots and nearby town lots, with twenty thousand dollars in gold dust, after which his wife had come out by steamship, almost dying of yellow fever in Panama. I helped Mrs. Austin cook and bake, and I cleaned and served meals, for which Jeptha and I were given free board and lodging and I received another twenty dollars a week; Jeptha brought in about forty dollars by helping to put up houses four days a week. On the other three days, he preached in the streets for nothing. At night, he collapsed on the bed and never attempted to be intimate with me.

  Captain Austin was short and had a head too large for his small body, like a funny man in a children’s book; he was clean-shaven, with sleepy, protuberant eyes. His sloping nose had a bulb at its end, and one of his small hands was missing half a pinky finger. Mrs. Austin described this gravely as a war wound. She was short and stout, with a face like her husband’s, and the same storybook proportions. He wasn’t around much except at meals, at which times his bulging eyes followed me in his unmoving head as though he were a lion studying a grass-eating creature from a hilltop.

  Mrs. Austin did not seem to notice. She dressed like a farm wife, in a baggy calico wrapper—she owned three—and a long, stained blue apron I never saw her without. She did not bathe as often as I would have liked, and this mattered to me, since we were constantly together. For several days, she did not speak except to tell me what to do. Then, one time when we were in the Flavius’s tiny galley, she paid me a compliment. She was mixing a tablespoon of saleratus into a bowl of corn flour. I was using an empty tin can to stamp out disks of dough for soup dumplings. Taking note of my speed, she said she had been afraid that, being pretty and refined, I would not be a hard worker, and she had been pleasantly surprised. But I mustn’t slack off now that she’d said this. I promised I wouldn’t (reminding myself that life is a wheel, as I believe Herodotus mentions somewhere). She said, “Everything happens fast here. Back east, Captain Austin would have taken twenty years to make his fortune. Other men might take ten years to admit they’ve failed; here that takes just months. Men who would do murder one day in Philadelphia do it here the first time they walk into a gambling hall; and the ones who would turn into broken-down drunks after twenty years, here you see sleeping in their puke a week after they arrive.”

  I was impressed by this observation, and I thought I might enjoy her company once I got used to her physical liabilities, but it turned out to be the sum total of her special wisdom; she was a one-idea person, like a minor character in a novel by Charles Dickens, and once the topic was introduced, no day passed without a discussion of Time in the West. For example, when I spoke to her about Jeptha’s prospects, and whether he would become known and have a church, she said, “Whatever happens, it will happen fast, you’ll see,” and she repeated the speech that had impressed me so much the first time I had heard it.

  Once, I carelessly described Captain Austin as “lucky.” Mrs. Austin, shoving equal proportions of red meat and white fat into a grinder, denied it so hotly I was afraid she would lose a finger. The country had been lucky to acquire this territory—with Captain Austin’s help, remember—just when gold was found on it. Captain Austin had seized the opportunity. His character was such as to make it inevitable for him to become rich: the gold discovery had merely hastened the process.

  There was something rather anxious about this insistence that her husband’s success was grounded on his talents: perhaps she was afraid it would turn out to be a mirage. And so it might. When she was not expounding her single insight, Mrs. Austin fretted out loud about her husband’s business, and I learned that Captain Austin had taken a great risk by sinking his money into the water lots around the Flavius. He had bought too late, when the market was high. Besides, he had purchased them during the time of transition between Mexican and American rule, when it was not clear who had a right to sell land. There was sure to be a legal battle, and if things went badly in the courts—perhaps even if they seemed likely to go badly in the courts—he might lose them.

  Even if Captain Austin held on to his wealth, that might not help Mrs. Austin. They often quarreled. One night I heard him say he wished he hadn’t sent for her.

  Really, there was nothing sillier than to deny the role of luck in everything that occurred in San Francisco in those unnatural years. The whole city was a vast casino; a fortune hung on every decision. Walk into this lodging tent; you and a fellow you happen to meet there start a mighty business enterprise still in operation in 1910. Walk into that other tent; die of cholera next week. Earn good pay loading riverboats; but lose the fortune you would have found in the gold fields.

  Philosophers know that all choices are fateful. Each decision destroys worlds of possibility and permits others to survive at least a little longer. In a gold rush, the process is visible to ordinary men, and since they’re not philosophers, it unsettles them, and they begin to do strange things.

  SOON AFTER WE ARRIVED, I woke to the noise of crackling and the smell of smoke. I shook Jeptha awake. “Wake up, wake up, the ship is on fire!” He jumped into his trousers, I wrapped myself in the blanket, and we hastened out to the deck along with others who had been roused by the commotion. It was determined pretty soon that the fire was not on the schooner. It was in the city. To wake us here, it must be big, but we could not see it until the fog lifted. By then, Jeptha and some of the other men were fighting it: his tasks for much of the day were to shovel mud onto burning walls to tie ropes to the tops of buildings in the fire’s path and to help to pull the buildings down.

  That day, Jeptha met David Broderick, the Tammany politician who had come from New York round the Horn in steerage, with the express purpose of becoming a U.S. senator from California when California became a state. Volunteer fire companies were the heart of Democratic Party politics, and Broderick showed considerable experience and conspicuous bravery in battling the flames, as did several other men who would come to have dubious reputations in San Francisco. Jeptha mentioned the name to me repeatedly, and later, when Broderick’s name was on everyone’s lips, its syllables would conjure a memory of Jeptha as he was during the fire—in a good mood, full of interesting news, pleased with his small but creditable role that day—and how grateful I was to the fire, hoping its salutary effects on my husband would last.

  The most popular explanation for the fire was that Australians set it in or
der to loot the stores. Another theory, told to me in several versions, was that the fire had been set by a Negro, who had been thrown out of the saloon where the conflagration began. Other people—Australians, Negroes, workingmen—insisted that the merchants had set it, to raise prices by destroying excess stock. The city was awash in tales of conspiracy, as might be expected when such a varying group of men are brought together and there is a treasure for them to fight over.

  JEPTHA MADE TEN DOLLARS A DAY helping to put up new edifices that were only a little more substantial than those that had burned down so easily. Many of them were portable houses of wood or iron that had been shipped in pieces around the Horn. He continued to preach in the streets outside the gambling saloons, and along the wharves, and among the tents on the hillsides. I noticed that when he talked to me about putting the houses together he spoke with pride, but when he spoke about his preaching, whether it went well or badly, there was a new distance in his voice, as though it had been spoiled for him. Once, in our cabin on the Flavius, he rehearsed to me the outline of a sermon he planned to give. “But I thought …,” I began, and stopped myself.

  “What?” He turned to me abruptly, as if I had caught him in the midst of some furtive crime. “What did you think?”

  “Nothing—just that you used not to prepare your sermons in advance.”

  He said nothing for a moment, and I saw he was sorry he had snapped at me. “I said, I think, when we were on the Juniper, I said that I used to plan them, and then I stopped planning them and just waited for the spirit to move me. But that was on the Juniper. Now I’m here in California, and a great deal hangs on the success of what I do here, and it would be remiss of me not to plan.”

  He had begun gently, but by the time he was done, the tone of his voice was nasty and defensive, a tone I had never before heard him assume with anyone. “I see,” I said.

  That night, a gasp woke me. I felt him leave the bed. I heard him moving in the dark. A match sputtered to life and lit the candle in its lamp on a small table we had bought for the cabin. I sat up and saw him reading the list of names of well-connected men my grandfather had sent in his last letter. This was the part of his job he hated most, going to these practical men, these proud adventurers in the world of trade, and asking them to subscribe to a church, or to help him to rent space for worship in some schoolhouse or the back room of some store, and working on their vanity and their ambition to be big men—founders of a great city’s oldest Baptist church—since it was no use working on their religious feelings. Even their vanity was a weak force, compared with their greed. He wrote in pencil next to some of the names. He knew I was watching him. “I’m a beggar,” he said. “Parsons are beggars.”

  Most professions have their little indignities. In the past he had always borne his cheerfully, sure of his abilities and his destiny, and believing that nothing was more important. “You work,” I reminded him. “You work as hard as any miner, for me and for God. They live for money; you have a higher purpose. Come to bed, Jeptha.”

  Eventually, he did. We lay together. He stroked my hair in a way that he sometimes did before he took me. I yielded to him, needing this comfort, too. He threw his flesh into mine as though he wished he could drown in me; and I felt that, after all, I was learning something new about the uses of carnality. But after our crisis, before we drifted off to sleep, I recollected that when his gasp woke me I had been dreaming of Philippe. And I thought that probably Jeptha had been dreaming of Philippe as well.

  Everything had been about Philippe since the moment the boy fell to the deck of the Juniper. Jeptha was like an animal running through the woods with a hunter’s arrow in him. The arrow had not taken him down yet, but it was bound to finally. Nothing I said was any help. The truest things I could think of saying—that no one is perfect and everybody makes mistakes—seemed banal and inadequate, and I made them weaker by hiding them among a lot of lies about Providence and tests from God, and everything being for the good in the long run, things he must have guessed I did not believe. In completely separate conversations, sometimes he would say he didn’t deserve me, and I would say, “Just the same, you have me, you always will.” Then we would go to bed.

  The next day, he came home carrying an empty light-brown sack imprinted in Spanish with the name of a Chilean flour company. He opened one of our trunks and stuffed into the sack every one of the forbidden books he had inherited from William Jefferds’s library—Paine, Volney, Strauss, Lessing, etc.—threw in rocks for extra weight, tied the sack, walked out of the cabin with the bag over his shoulder; I followed him, feeling that something very grave was happening, whose nature I did not quite comprehend. The hard edges of the books bulged, receded, and bulged again in temporary lines and rectangles on the coarse-woven cloth as they swung behind his back. He walked to the schooner’s stern, which was in the deepest water. I saw what he meant to do. “Must you?” I asked; he nodded, and he threw the sack into the bay.

  I didn’t need to tell him that the books might fetch a great deal of money here. Nor could I believe his character had deteriorated to the point where he feared it to be known that he had possessed them. No, it had deteriorated to this point: he saw them as dangerous—to him and to others. Destroying books was no longer just for priests.

  I asked him how his day had gone. He told me that he had preached to excellent effect outside the old adobe Custom House on Portsmouth Square.

  “You’re doing well,” I said. “You’re becoming known.”

  “I think so.”

  “This is what you are made for. You’re good at it because you are made for it.”

  “Yes, no doubt.” He was quiet for a while, and then, as if he had just been reminded of a completely different topic: “I’ve lost my faith.” He said it lightly, as if he meant his gloves, and they were bound to turn up.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t mean that. Do you?”

  “No, of course not. I was just joking,” and he talked a little about the sermon he would deliver next Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church.

  I had sometimes hoped he would lose his faith, so we could be of like mind; but I had wanted it to happen gradually, over the years, taking it all a little less seriously as time went on, with maybe just enough complacent, nebulous credulity left over to ease the passage to decrepitude and death. Not like this; I had no idea where this might lead.

  XLVI

  ABOUT EVERY TWO WEEKS, the placement of two long black boards on a high tower on Telegraph Hill announced the arrival of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s side-wheeler. Then for a few days, the post office—a small wooden building with a porch and square columns, at Clay and Pike Streets—would be surrounded by a homesick mob while the clerks inside frantically alphabetized. Two lines formed, one before the window for mail in foreign languages, the other before the window for English mail and newspapers. Some men made a regular occupation of standing in the mud half the day, while slanting rain beat their hats and puddles deepened, so when their place was close to the front they could sell it.

  To be sure of intercepting letters from Agnes, I always went straight to the front of the line and paid one of those men for his place. I would pay cash on delivery for Agnes’s letter, read it to follow the progress of her investigation, and burn it, the first moment I was alone, in the cookstove in the galley of the Flavius. I left all the other letters for Jeptha, so that he would think he was getting the mail.

  Our room on the Flavius was a sailing vessel’s stateroom, with a few chairs and a table and a washstand, and a spring bed with a feather mattress in place of the shelflike berths. It was damp and chilly and smelled of the wharf. I expected that in a few months at the most we would find better accommodations; in any case, the discomforts of my existence did not make me long for my former life with a cook, a lady’s maid, carpets, fireplaces, a water closet, theaters, and restaurants. I wanted everything to be different, so that I could be different. I cooked, cleaned, carried water, and
made fires. With every sweep of the corn broom, I was becoming a better woman.

  Memories of the Flavius come back to me easily: calm days when each vessel sat on its quivering, upended watery twin; clear nights when lights on the ships were reflected as shimmering yellow streamers in the bay. Up in the hills, the tents and canvas houses, lit from within, resembled paper lanterns suspended in the blackness.

  I don’t remember the exact date when I went to the post office and saw Jeptha stepping out from the shadow of the porch and into the light, a clutch of envelopes in his hand. I do know that it was in late February, and that I was a month past my time, with all the signs of pregnancy, but I had not told him yet. As soon as I saw him, I formed a plan to distract him with the news of my condition and get the letters before he read them.

  It was chilly but clear. The wind rose, sending handbills into flight, making ripples in the shallow tawny puddles and the deep silver-black puddles on the undulating streets, while men pulled their coats tight and grabbed their hats. Jeptha looked dazed and lost, sadder than his fellows, and when he saw me there was something else—shock, fear—and he turned his face away as though consulting with the horizon or a wheelbarrow or a sparrow; when he turned back, he looked on me with a sort of shyness. I knew he had just read one of Agnes’s letters. I felt I was in terrible trouble, but not beyond hope. We walked toward each other and embraced. I realized again, as if in the previous second I had forgotten it, that he had read the letter. “Arabella,” he murmured, and the knowledge was present in the way he uttered my name, with a hint, suppressed, but detectable, of helpless grief.