Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  Behind me, the door of this little room opened and shut, changing the light for a moment, and I heard one of the gamblers call for whiskey, and another for sandwiches and a fresh deck. I had another look at Charley. He was past forty now. His face was etched by his habits, by several cigars daily, and whiskey drunk like water from the moment he awoke (generally in the afternoon) to a nightcap just before his eyes closed in sleep (a little before sunrise, sometimes a little after). Fine lines webbed the corners of his eyes. He never did a lick of manual labor. His body was soft. The impression of strength it gave, the strength it actually had in an emergency, was entirely a product of his character.

  He won the pot—enough to buy a thousand silk shirts. “You always bring me luck,” he said, and I realized he had been down and out after all, for weeks perhaps, but now he wasn’t. Now he’d be on a winning streak.

  When we were upstairs in his room, I bade him sit in a chair and wait and watch while I stripped to my undergarments. As I sat with my legs across his lap and my arm around his neck, I brought him up to date about Frank, and about Jeptha. I got up and took Anne’s letters about Frank out of my carpetbag. “Read them to me,” he said.

  “Later, Papa.” I put the letters back in the bag, and I got on his lap again, this time facing him and straddling him, undoing his shirt buttons, kissing him, making him moan. I gave myself to him and brought him to his crisis right there in the chair, and my flesh had responded just enough to hide that inside I grieved, inside I was waste and desolation. The sadness I thought I had managed to push away rose within me like a whirlwind. I had never known such grief. I felt a kind of panic, fearing that I would break down and cry right in the middle of it, fearing what would happen if Charley saw it, and fearing more than anything that Charley would be no use to me after all, that nothing in the world could really help me and I would die of this grief.

  When we were done, I pushed the feeling away, and was cheerful with him—cheerful, as I well knew how to be with a man when I was unhappy—and hoped that he did not notice the falseness of it; most men didn’t.

  We had supper sent up to the room with champagne. I read the letters, and we talked some more. We undressed down to our skin; he took me again, and we fell asleep. But when I woke up, not long afterward, the awful sorrow had returned, and the tears streamed down. Charley mustn’t see those tears. I got up and pulled the chair to the window. I sat looking at the street through a crack in the shade and wept as quietly as I could, until, just behind me, I heard him say softly, “What is it, Belle? What’s the matter?” This opened the floodgates—sobs so loud they must have been audible all through the house and outside it, so powerful they hurt my back and made me gasp. It was all there was of me. I could hardly breathe, but I had to speak: “He’s broken me, I’m nothing anymore, I’m not even here, I’m in pieces. Oh damnit. I’m so sorry, Charley. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to you. Damnit, damnit, Charley, forgive me.”

  “You can cry,” he said. “Cry it out, go on,” he said, kissing me and pulling me to him. “So you’re not made of wood. Look, you’ve got feelings, you’re miserable, that don’t mean you’re broken. You’ve been down before. You always come back.”

  “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

  “It’ll pass. I’ll get you through it.”

  “I’m scared you won’t be able to help me.”

  “You want it, it’s yours.”

  “I’m—you don’t understand. I want to love you. I want you to make me love you. I’m scared you won’t be able to make me love you.”

  This stopped him. Neither of us said anything for what seemed like too long a time, so that I thought, That’s it, I’ve wrecked it. “Oh,” he said at last. “Well, that’ll be harder. That’s a tall order, all right.” A few more seconds passed during which I believe he considered the question quite seriously and objectively; during which—for the first time in his life, probably—he weighed his chances of getting a woman to love him. “What’ve we got to lose? I’ll give it a shot, and we’ll see, okay?”

  “You’re not reliable. You don’t want to be reliable.”

  He laughed, which made me laugh, too, in the middle of the tears and the terror.

  “I’ll work on that,” he said. “Now that I’m a papa, I gotta work on that.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Feel better?”

  I nodded. “A little.”

  “Good.”

  We were both quiet for a while. Then he said, “California is a good place for people like us.” He thought a little bit more and said, quietly but with a good deal more force than was usual for him, “I mean … just look at you. Look at what you’ve got—inside and out. Show me anybody else like you.”

  “Oh, Charley.”

  “You’ll show them.”

  “Say, ‘We’ll show them,’ Charley.”

  “Sure. Okay. We’ll show them.”

  He looked at me a little longer and said, “Why don’t you come to bed? You gotta cry, cry where it’s comfortable.”

  I went back to the bed, and I didn’t feel the need to cry anymore. I laid my head on his chest, and sleep came.

  HE HAD AFFAIRS TO WRAP UP in Sacramento City, and, with one thing and another, it took a month for us to be together again. After that—he was right, it was a symptom of California’s freakishness in those times that it was an excellent place for people like us. In San Francisco especially, where many rules were suspended as unworkable until certain necessary equipment had belatedly arrived from the States, we were as close to respectable as anyone in our professions could ever be. This acceptance was never perfect, nor was it the same for both of us. In houses that contained lawful wives, Charley was welcome and I was not. We were both shunned by a few prudes who, it turned out, had principles, the simple, honest prudes discovering right here, for the first time, that they alone actually believed the things that most everyone back east pretended to believe. But generally, in this city ordered by the appetites of young men a continent from home, we stood high in the social pyramid, friendly with fellows whose names today adorn equestrian statues, multi-volume biographies, and street maps. One day, chins up, standing partly to the side and a little out in front of their wives, they would demand that I leave the city that it might purify itself of evil, but now these men, who knew us from Big Pete’s El Dorado and from my parlor house, were openly friendly to us in restaurants and theaters and at races and baseball games. They doffed their hats to me, and they were so respectful to my girls I almost forgot there was shame in what we did.

  Though Charley had a fine practical understanding of men and women, I never heard him say a word against a single one of them. He never aired his views on general matters or spoke of his philosophy. Yet his whole life was like a studied insult to the Protestant convictions of the people among whom my childhood was spent. The black-clad men who handed out Bibles on the New York waterfront and the pioneer farmers who washed each other’s feet in their puncheon-floored church had divided humanity into the saved and the damned. They had believed in hard work and self-denial. They were builders. Even at their most superstitious they were modern, whereas there were men like Charley in Carthage and Babylon. For him the great division was between sporting people and all the others. He believed in skill, luck, fate, pleasure, and loyalty. He did not believe in equality or progress. He was a hunter. He exercised his profession, which was also his passion, in short, intense stints. The rest of his life was a vacation spent in the company of his friends in barbershops and saloons, cock pits and shooting galleries, theaters and hotels and gambling halls. He was useful only in his seignorial generosity, supplying funds to any friend who needed to be helped through a hard time, good to waiters, washerwomen, cripples, and shoeshine boys. There are white-haired men today, cutting hair, tending bar, cadging drinks, in the bits of old San Francisco that survived the earthquake, who still speak of him fondly.

  He was flush or broke—that was the nature of his pro
fession—but flush much more often than broke. I was always flush. We lived well.

  SOMETHING WAS MISSING. Something always is. Is anyone ever really perfectly content? Unless we are crushed by care, or in a desperate struggle that leaves no time for reflection, we are all restless and dissatisfied, if only because none of us can have his cake and eat it, too. As in some houses certain rooms are locked and left just as they were on the day a child disappeared, so certain rooms in my heart were left unvisited, but dimly remembered amid the gayest revels.

  Sometimes I felt blue. I would watch myself from the outside and say, “She only thinks she’s having fun.” Sometimes I was sure I had made a terrible mistake: better to live out a life of starchy repentance somewhere my secrets would never be discovered, send for Frank, tell everyone his father was dead, start again—nothing for me, everything for the blameless product of my sin, my boy! That looked good in a daydream. Then, moody and irritable, I would pick a fight with Charley, but Charley wouldn’t fight. In a fight with Charley, I was the raging sea, he the immovable cliff; my victory was certain if I persisted a million years. He formed the notion that I had moods. He put on his hat and found other company until I was feeling better.

  “Send for him if you miss him so much,” Charley would say, when I fretted out loud about Frank.

  “You don’t understand. I can’t have him growing up in a brothel,” I’d say.

  “Rent a house for him. Hire a nanny. He can live two blocks away with the nanny. You could see him all the time. You don’t have to say you’re his mother.”

  “But by the time he grew up he’d figure it out. He’d hate me.”

  Once he said, “You keep thinking of reasons why it can’t be done. Maybe you don’t really want him.” I didn’t talk to him for a week, and after that he never said it again, and I didn’t bring it up again for a long time.

  Another time, we had one of these conversations, and he said just what he always said, with the same words and the same shrug, but somehow his reasoning found me in a receptive mood. I sat at the desk that had once belonged to Captain Austin and wrote a letter to Anne in Livy, thanking her for all she had done to help Frank, the little orphan, while my life was unsettled. Now, though, as I had told her earlier, Jeptha and I had divorced, I had remarried; and my new husband, a prosperous banker, was eager to adopt the infant with whom I had formed such a strong attachment in the first year of his life. I would make arrangements for a woman who was making the trip west to take him to San Francisco by sea.

  A little over three months later, a letter came back from Anne, politely refusing my request—saying that I could not mean it, I must not have been thinking straight when I wrote that letter. That, hard as it must have been for me, I had done the right thing by bringing Frank to Livy. He was happy in their house. It would be wrong to uproot him. Besides, Frank was a frail child, and such a journey might kill him. I wouldn’t want that to happen, would I? (The suggestion that I needed to be told how to feel about the prospect of my son’s death made me so angry that I wasted paper on three replies I had to tear up.) I realized that my request must have hurt her, and I wrote to her apologizing, and making my case again, more subtly. She was not moved, though she held out a little thread of hope that when he was older perhaps things would be different.

  I had always assumed that Anne would consider the bond of a child and mother sacred, so her resistance was a blow to me. But it made things easier, too. It was out of my hands.

  In San Francisco, I was never one of the attractions in my own house, though I traded a good deal in false hope, as I believe even respectable women do if they are pretty. According to my fictitious life story, I had been seduced long ago by a rich man whose family would have disowned him had we married, I had buried that fellow’s child, and except for him I had never known any man but Charles Cora.

  He was, so far as I ever found out, faithful to me, and scrupulous in his insistence that I be treated respectfully. He took it for granted that this was our town. Towns like this, if they served any purpose, existed for the convenience of gamblers and whores.

  Today, when people like us are spoken of, we occupy a position somewhere below the Indians in a Wild West show. We are symptoms of lawlessness, villains, necessary only so that in defeating us the heroes may exercise their fortitude. What did we produce? Nothing. We dug no gold. We built no wharves, warehouses, or factories. We fed on the dreams of reckless young men. That’s one view. I understand it perfectly, but I can’t help feeling that it overlooks important truths about gold rushes, cities, and the world. Though it is true we added nothing practical to San Francisco, we were in perfect harmony with the spirit of the place. I think we resembled the gods of ancient times, who could be selfish and cruel, yet were never really useless. Why do men arise in the morning, work, risk, endure, if not for desire, which is as necessary to human progress as the sun? For a few years, Charley and I were the incarnations of greed and concupiscence, Mammon and Venus; and whatever lying prayers your lips may utter, in your hearts you pray to us.

  XLIX

  THE ATTENTIVE READER WILL OBSERVE THAT sometimes in the course of this narrative I claim the playwright’s prerogative of leaping forward in time. I skip over months or years, to the moment of a crisis in my affairs; and we discover that certain cast members have disappeared, while others, who spent the whole previous act in exile, have apparently returned long ago. It all happened in the interval, while the audience perambulated in the lobby, smoking cigars and drinking refreshments.

  Still, even in a play, when the curtain rises, there is a moment for learning all we can from the new props we find on the stage, and a helpful line in the playbill tells us where we are and what the year is. Very well: We find ourselves in a fancy house with entrances on Dupont Street and Washington Street, in February of 1851, in a city that is still in flux. San Francisco has burned down three times more since the fire I saw from the deck of the Flavius a little over a year ago. It has been in each instance quickly rebuilt, larger and more substantial than before, in a miracle wrought by the gold of California. Ships more full of treasure than the galleons of New Spain leave our port monthly, and each day from the States—as we still call the main body of the country, though California now is a state—come other ships, laden with every simple necessity and idle luxury that human labor can provide, all cheaper to sail around the Horn or drag across Panama than to make here. Even brick and limestone, trousers, apples, and ice are cheaper to import. Men send their shirts to be laundered in Hawaii.

  I am twenty-two years old. It is a year since Jeptha threw me in the bay. But as Mrs. Austin has remarked, things happen quickly in this city. It seems much longer, and I feel much older. I’ve been busy. Eighteen forty-nine, the Juniper, Rio—that was another life. I don’t think about it. Edward and Lewis are back in town, after a falling out in the mining camps. Edward, after trying his hand at many things, now works as a reporter for the San Francisco Herald. Lewis lives very irregularly; he has done things that don’t bear close examination. He and Edward see each other sometimes, but they aren’t on very good terms.

  I meet them both occasionally, but not at my house, because I don’t want their family connection to me known.

  Edward has said: “I know how it is between you and Lewis. But I have to be honest with you: if you want anything in this life except worry and heartbreak, you have to know that Lewis is a dead man. It will be a miracle if he sees twenty-five. He lives by the sword. He likes hurting people. I’ve seen it. And he’s reckless. Men like that die young. We’ve got to resign ourselves.”

  And I have said this in reply: “Our mother told me what my responsibility was toward Lewis. I have lived up to it, and he, what he has done for me, what he and I are to each other—don’t pretend you understand that. Only Lewis and I understand that. We’re a family of two, he and I. You’re an agreeable fellow, Edward, but I have no notion what you use in place of a heart.”

  We made up and agreed t
o be friends. Edward was shocked to learn how I make my living, but that did not last long, and he is by now quite comfortable with the idea. I think he actually likes me better this way. It confirms his view of women. From Edward, I found out that Robert knows. My grandfather must have told him. Robert loves me, so he is heartbroken, but wishes to have no further communication with me.

  From the street, my house looks plain, two stories tall, with an unpainted exterior. It is not meant to excite the curiosity of pedestrians. Still, anyone who has been in San Francisco for over a week has heard all about it. They know that when you knock on that unassuming door on Dupont Street you are met by a Negro maid or footman, better dressed and cleaner than ninety-nine out of a hundred of the inhabitants in this raw and grimy city. Your eyes, long accustomed to disorder and squalor, behold what appears to be a hallway in some European palace—Brussels carpets, damask curtains, crystal chandeliers, mirrors, paintings, mahogany surfaces rubbed by servants until their laboring hands are reflected in the wood. Perhaps briefly you glimpse one of the inhabitants, the sweets in this improbable candy box, the costliest luxury of all.

  To the best house in San Francisco come the best men of San Francisco: bankers, merchants, ship owners, real-estate developers, judges, the mayor, the aldermen, the collector of the port. Their friendship helps me in several ways. They spend money in my house. Thanks to them, no laws hostile to my business are passed, and ruffians do not break into my house and mistreat my girls. Thanks to them, my house is popular even when the city is in one of its periodic business slumps. There is still money to be made during hard times if you know the people who pull the strings—and they are all here, the leading bankers, merchants, and ship owners, the judges, the mayor, the aldermen, the collector of the port. All I have to do is keep them happy.