Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  And so we made a bargain. I didn’t marry him, nor was I his concubine. It was a business arrangement. Mrs. Austin became a maid of all work. How did she take this treatment? She learned. We must all learn sometime.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER CAPTAIN AUSTIN AND I reached our agreement, one of Mrs. Austin’s boarders handed me a note from Herbert Owen, suggesting a time and place where we might meet to discuss the divorce. The day after that, I took my best dresses out of my trunks and spent a day freshening them and ironing them, with the help of the recently subjugated Mrs. Austin. Tight-laced, in boots, holding my skirts over the mud, I walked carefully to a French café on the south side of Kearny Street, which had an appearance that might generously be called picturesque: narrow, steep, and irregular; its buildings—some of canvas, some of wood—set low or high according to the level of the ground on which they had been erected; signboards and painted cloth banners in Spanish, French, and German; and sidewalks made out of barrel staves and packing cases and upended tin cans.

  Inside the café, beneath a tin ceiling stamped in the shapes of flowers and vines, were rectangular tables. The diners, wearing dirty linen shirts and vests and rumpled frock coats, ate with the usual velocity. I spotted Jeptha and Herbert and walked to their table. As I moved, the patrons swung their heads to keep me in their field of vision while shoveling food into their mouths without pause. As an afterthought, just before I sat down, I looked back at one of them for a few seconds. He rose, took off his hat, and bowed; a few more followed his example, and then the rest of them did, all except Jeptha and Herbert Owen.

  “Do you know that man?” asked Jeptha.

  “Oh, I know all of them,” I said.

  Owen put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and said sadly, “Jeptha prefers to keep the occasion of your quarrel a secret from these men, and he supposes you want that as well. So we’ll discuss what needs to be done in general terms, if you’re agreed.”

  A greasy blackboard gave the bill of fare in French and English, and a waiter in a dirty shirt and torn trousers added to this the astonishing statement that, with sufficient advance warning and for a small fortune, one could have a grizzly-bear steak brought to the table. I ordered extravagantly: fresh eggs, biscuits, and coffee with cream (five times as costly as black coffee). Herbert Owen had soup and mutton. Jeptha had black coffee.

  Even here, said Owen, one party in a divorce must sue the other, with grounds, creating a public record and a blot on the sued party’s reputation. Our choices were: natural impotence, adultery, extreme cruelty, habitual intemperance, desertion, willful neglect.

  “You ought to let me be the petitioner, don’t you think?” I said.

  Jeptha and Owen looked at each other and back at me. They were inclined to let me have my way: they did not want a court case making Jeptha famous as the Baptist preacher so dumb that he had unknowingly married a parlor-house madam. “All right,” said Owen.

  “Recite the grounds again,” I asked, just to be mean. He did. “Desertion,” I said finally.

  Owen would prepare the petition. We would appear before a judge in district court, and it should not take long.

  Jeptha asked me if I was planning to stay in San Francisco.

  “Why? Do you think I should go away? Where should I go?”

  “Anywhere, I guess. You’re free.”

  “I think I will stay here. There are many opportunities for a woman here. A woman could get rich here just doing men’s laundry.”

  “Is that what you plan to do here, laundry?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  I planned to run my business under the name of “Mrs. Jeptha Talbot.” Mrs. Talbot’s, they’d say, the best damned house in the whole damned town.

  I asked him what his plans were. After a hesitation, as though he hated to say a word to me not spoken in contempt, he said that he and Herbert Owen were going to try their hand at prospecting.

  Then he was going to give up preaching. I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot I hated him, forgot I didn’t believe in God, and I wanted to talk him out of it. The moment passed.

  “If you like,” he added, and he cleared his throat—I could see this took effort—“if you like, I could ask about Lewis and Edward.”

  I thought about this, what he might mean by it. When I tried to find a clue in his tired face, I decided it was his essential decency, and I wanted no part of it. “What a gentleman you are. What a good man. What a knight,” and I watched him react to each of these compliments as though he were a disgraced officer being ceremoniously stripped of various ribbons and chevrons and epaulettes. “Yes, thank you,” I said after a little more time had gone by.

  For a moment, nothing was said, and then I took thought. “Not a preacher anymore, really? So quickly?”

  He didn’t answer. I took another look at him. He was brushed and neat and shaven—he would never neglect such things. In fact, his neck had been scraped pink by the razor; and his hair, which I had cut two weeks ago with scissors that had been mine when I was Harriet Knowles, was pasted and combed across his brow like the hair of a farmer dressed for church. But otherwise he did not look well: his sunken eyes told me he had not slept; his face looked thin, as though he hadn’t been eating; and he bore as well, I thought, the subtle marks of an inner struggle over God and Tom Paine and Philippe and me. His deterioration bothered me for a moment almost as if he were still my responsibility, but I pushed the feeling aside. I had to be hard now; I had to show myself stronger than he was.

  Of course, if he was not a preacher, perhaps it would hurt him less when I became a madam again—that was too bad, since I wanted so much to hurt him (so I told myself, though at that moment I did not feel it). When we were on Kearny Street again, outside the café, I had another attack of worry for him and said, “But you will go back to it. To preaching.”

  He gave me a look that reminded me that it was none of my business, and, as if speaking to someone past my shoulder, he said, “I haven’t decided.”

  It was pathetic, really, this show of indifference, and only to be expected after the bile I had spent the last hour feeding him, but it angered me. “Well,” I said. “Well, well, well. You sure pulled a fast one.” He realized that I was about to shower him with abuse and started walking away. Herbert tipped his hat and followed. I spoke in a normal conversational tone to their backs. “You sure fooled the California Missionary Committee. Here you are, sitting pretty, where everyone wants to be. And those fools paid for it.”

  They had turned the corner before I was done, and I didn’t say the last two sentences out loud. I only thought them. Just the same, he heard me.

  IN THE END, I REMEMBERED HOW EFFECTIVE the threat of staining the family name had been with my grandfather, and I decided not to go by “Mrs. Jeptha Talbot.” Better to keep a weapon like that in reserve. For that reason, I gave myself a new name and a new past when I became a madam a second time. I became Arabella Ryan, a clergyman’s daughter from Baltimore. My precautions did not need to be elaborate. On occasion, someone would tell me the beloved story of the man who threw his wife into the bay when he found out that she had been a parlor-house madam back in the States, and if the storyteller dared to ask me if I had been the wife, I would reply, “Would you like me to say I was?” Often the husband in the story was a minister. But Jeptha was never named. So it did not link us, or link me to my old name. The few people who knew had various reasons to keep quiet. It has remained for me to reveal the truth.

  XLVIII

  THERE WAS A RESHUFFLING OF CABINS on the Flavius as boarders were ejected. Captain Austin and his wife, who remained together, moved into a smaller cabin. I moved into theirs. I let them take their bed, but kept Captain Austin’s writing desk and his whale-oil lamp. I also kept the chair. Sitting there, amid the noise of water beating the hull and footsteps on the deck and the hammering of carpenters I had hired to change the boat into a floating palace, I thought and thought. Every item in my world put up its hand, as
king for re-examination, and as I made each decision I felt a little better, a little stronger, the voice of my old self saying: Fool, fool, so you thought you could be a minister’s wife? Aren’t you ashamed? Isn’t this better after all? And though I was starting up a new place from scratch, inevitably much about the experience was familiar. It was like returning to a room you had left six months before, and while the servants take the sheets off the furniture and draw the drapes, it all comes back to you, and there is a spurious feeling of immortality in the proof that you can so easily reassume your old life. I bit my lip and chewed on the pen. I wrote to Jocelyn, assuring her that she would be treated like a queen here and I would pay her fare. And I asked her to bring a friend or two—the most beautiful she could find, and they must have wardrobes, and I would pay their fares as well.

  Since I did not want my old friend to get yellow fever while waiting for a boat in Panama City or Chagres, I told her to come round the Horn. If she followed my advice, it might be six months or even eight before I saw her. I would have to find my first girls nearer to hand.

  Charley, I suddenly realized: I had to see Charley. I went to the Parker House, where I was recognized immediately—not as Harriet Knowles, but as someone like her, as a prosperous denizen of the sporting world—and was treated with friendliness and professional courtesy. When I said the name Charles Cora, there were smiles of fond recognition. He was a legend among gamblers as the man who, in one six-month period, had broken the biggest faro banks in New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Natchez. But Charley wasn’t in San Francisco anymore, and his forwarding address had been lost with the burning of a previous incarnation of the Parker House in the December fire. “Ask Big Pete Hughes, at the El Dorado,” I was told. “Big Pete will know.”

  I went up the street and walked into the El Dorado. Its atmosphere was an agreeable assault on the senses, like a friend grabbing your hand and pulling you onto the dance floor without a by-your-leave. I was enveloped by the music of fiddles and concertinas, by the aromas of slow matches, cigars, and whiskey. Past the hats and heads and shoulders of the crowd, I glimpsed, to my left, a massive bar. Its far end was lost in smoke, and it was accompanied along its vanishing length by the customary appointments of crystal chandeliers, mirrors, and oil paintings of reclining odalisques. A row of slender columns ran down the center of the room; another, crosswise, row supported a balcony. Hung on ropes from the ceiling, rings of globular lamps lit up the gambling tables. The faces of the dealers were childlike and innocent. The faces of the suckers, clutching the dollars they insisted on gambling away, were determined. Pretty French girls sat at some of the tables, not doing anything, merely present, like the wallpaper and the crystal, as reminders of what money can buy.

  It was a nice place. I liked it, and I felt at home there right away.

  I came in, chin up, back straight, the hook of my parasol lifting my skirts over the sawdust. I sat at a vingt-et-un table, ordered wine and a cigarita, drank and smoked, and lost two hundred dollars with a shrug.

  By and by, a fashionably dressed woman—pretty, quite small, red-haired, with freckles and green eyes—sat beside me. She introduced herself as Irene Grogan and said she was the close friend of Mr. Peter Hughes, who was the owner of this establishment, as I might already know. She pointed to a mustachioed ruffian at a table on the mezzanine not far above us; he tipped his hat and nodded. Would I like to meet him? she asked. Yes, I said, and we went up the stairs to his table. He rose to greet me, and I saw that he stood well over six feet. He wore a Prince Albert frock coat with a fur collar, and a crisp white shirt and silk cravat and striped waistcoat and striped trousers, all clean, which was the biggest luxury of all in San Francisco in 1850. On his head was a misshapen, worn-out leather slouch hat, the brim permanently turned up here and down there, so ugly and in such contrast to the rest of his outfit that it couldn’t just be his favorite hat; it had to be his lucky hat.

  The two of them began feeling me out by asking if I had ever been to New Orleans or New York, and if I knew this or that street or person, and by what route I had come. I answered truthfully but evasively, and finally said I was looking for Charles Cora, who was a friend of mine. Big Pete said he was well acquainted with Charley, a fine feller, “straight as a string,” and last he heard he was at the Belle Vista Hotel in Sacramento City. I thanked him.

  Then Irene invited me to live and work at her parlor house, a few blocks away from the El Dorado. It was the best in town. I said, “Let’s see it,” and we walked there. It smelled of sawdust and paint. The girls were pretty, but otherwise it wasn’t much. She explained that the previous house had perished in the big fire; curtains and carpets were on order. I told her I would think about it, and she said, “Damnit, I knew it. I told Pete. You’re a madam.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” I said.

  “You want my honest opinion? Don’t do it. We don’t need another house here. Go to Sacramento City. They’re growing fast. You can get in on the ground floor.”

  “Sacramento. Oh. Sounds like good advice. I’m glad we met.”

  “Go fuck yourself.” Her face got red. “You’re not taking any of my girls. My girls are loyal. I treat them like daughters. They’re like daughters to me.”

  “Your daughters are lovely, but I’m not going to get anywhere here with girls from another house. Gentlemen want fresh girls, and getting them is my lookout. Irene, don’t be sore. We shouldn’t have to start out this way, but I’m new here, and I had to look things over from the inside before I started throwing my money around.”

  She said that if I had been honest with her she would have told me anything I needed to know. That was nonsense. Even so, eventually, we became friends. We were competitors, but we also had a community of interest and outlook.

  I got to know Big Pete and Irene pretty well. He ran a square gambling house, as such places went. He considered it bad luck to possess a coin smaller than a silver dollar; so every morning, at four o’clock, he collected all the small change the El Dorado had taken in the night before and threw it out among the Indian boys who had come to feed their goats on the refuse of the vegetable market. Irene was volatile but sweet. She and Big Pete were famous for their fights, and once, after a big one, she drugged his wine and shaved his head. That was her idea of vengeance. Big Pete eventually moved to Denver without Irene, and finally I lost track of both of them. Many times, years apart, I have thought that I saw her face, hurt by time, in a restaurant, or among the bathers at an oceanside resort, or in the run-down lobby of a hotel full of aged, indigent women.

  SOON AFTER MEETING PETE AND IRENE, I dressed in clothes selected with the intention of dazzling Charley and took the Pacific Mail steamer to Sacramento City, a monstrously overgrown trading post which announced itself with a stench of rotten groceries a few minutes before it came into view. It struck me as a lonelier variation on the theme of San Francisco. Recently, the river had overrun its banks, drowned the city, and receded, leaving dead fish and burlap sacks in the branches of the sycamores. The hillside was littered with heaps of lumber—shacks carried and then abandoned by the swell—and on every standing edifice, a flood line of mud and small leaves like a bathtub ring told me where the waters had reached their highest level. Yet in the streets, by now dry, men were hammering, carrying sacks, leading mules, unloading covered wagons. The gold rush was a flood, too. There had never been anything like it, and there was no stopping it.

  The Belle Vista Hotel was a two-story building with a façade that made it look a yard taller than it was. I stood before it, readying myself. At last, I walked in. There was the usual gaudy interior, as though a genie had transported a piece of Monte Carlo onto the unpaved main street of a scrubby town in the middle of nowhere. When I mentioned Charley’s name to the bartender, he directed me to a back room, and there he was, in darkness and lamplight in the early afternoon, in the middle of a card game.

  “Belle,” he said quietly, and put his cards down and gave me a little smile t
hat acknowledged the time that had passed since we had last seen each other. “Gentlemen, this is my old friend Belle.” He stood up, and the other men followed his example. He bowed, and looked at them as though a little surprised to see they weren’t bowing, too, and so they did.

  I sat at the big table in a seat that was brought for me, and he spoke about me in flattering terms in a tone that put me under his protection. I needed to know what was going on with Charley, and I needed to know how I felt about him. Something told me not to pause for one long look but to gather information in a series of glances, from various angles in various lights. His shirt and his vest were of the finest silk, but they were stained; when he put an arm around me, I could smell a history of meals, drinks, cigars, and all-night card games, along with the distinctive smell of Charley’s sweat, which I had once grown to like, but not in so highly concentrated a solution. He was a dandy, and in New York he had kept himself immaculate; I wondered if he was down and out, as I knew he was every so often, or if this was the effect of the gold rush, a world of men, a shortage of laundresses. I burrowed into him, not only for comfort but to answer the important question—could he comfort me?—and to help him find a way into my heart. “Papa,” I surprised myself by murmuring. It seemed to surprise him, too. I felt him startle and relax, and gradually he pulled away and looked at me quizzically. Perhaps it was then he remembered that he was indeed a papa. We were mother and father together. But what else did I mean by “papa”? I don’t think I really knew.