Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  Did Jeptha find himself thinking, lately, that, but for his actions, we might have a child? Did he remember my saying that I hoped he would never be a father? Did he believe in God now, or did he see religion as a big white lie? Or had he become even more cynical than that? I told myself that I was curious about these things. I thought I lived without illusions, but really no one does.

  CITY ELECTIONS WERE HELD IN SEPTEMBER. David Broderick and the men he supported were voted out, and were replaced mainly by Know-Nothings chosen by Sam Brannan and his friends. The Committee of Vigilance promptly announced that the city was safe and officially ceased its operations, with a warning that they would keep an eye on evildoers and return if the people needed them. They were to return five years later.

  LIII

  A MAN WHO CALLED HIMSELF JAMES KING OF WILLIAM, and who was to become famous as a newspaper editor and as my enemy, came to my house for the last time a month after the 1851 Committee of Vigilance disbanded. He had been an occasional visitor for almost a year.

  He was a banker then. With help from his connections back east, he had become very rich in San Francisco; he was vain of that accomplishment. He was vain generally, and sensitive, and vindictive. He came to my house with his customers and colleagues. He did not touch the girls; he said that he was married. When I told him that half my patrons were married, he raised his chin absurdly (no one dared to smile) and said, “I don’t look to what other men do.” Everyone could tell he was here for Pauline, poor fellow. When any other man went with her, King’s nose would lift and his head turn in a transparent parody of indifference. Evidently a great drama was unfolding in his breast. He was torturing himself. Perhaps somehow he enjoyed it. I hoped so. I felt sorry for him.

  He had a stage hero’s face, placed, like a cruel joke, atop a small, narrow-shouldered body. To the girls, the combination was funny. How he might have reacted had he heard their talk, I shuddered to imagine, for his self-esteem was exquisitely tender. Yet he tempted the world’s laughter with his oddities, beginning with the ridiculous self-chosen name. Why “of William”? people would ask innocently. Is that your home town? With icy vehemence he would reply that William was the Christian name of his father back in Georgetown, Maryland, where there were several James Kings. Calling himself after the town would have been “quite useless.” But hadn’t John Smiths and Tom Browns the world over solved this exact problem by means of middle initials? “I told you: I don’t look to what other men do.”

  I hope I need not point out that a man who says such things is a slave to his obsession with the doings of other men.

  He told me about his mostly ordinary life: he had been a printer, and a bank clerk, and apparently he had come west in emulation of his big brother, Henry, who froze to death in the Rockies and was eaten by his starving comrades while James was on a ship rounding the Horn. There was also a younger brother, a black sheep, named Thomas.

  He liked me. He showed it by expressing disapproval of the company I kept.

  “I don’t care for your friend Mr. Cora,” he said one day. “He’s one of Broderick’s scoundrels.”

  This was in August; the committee, of which King was a member, had already hanged four men.

  “You’re mistaken, Mr. King.”

  “I believe I am not. I saw him down at the Metropolitan, drinking with Mr. McGowan, the crooked judge, who is Broderick’s brain.”

  “Charley is friendly, like me. He is nobody’s man.”

  “I hope for his sake you’re right,” said King, and delivered a quiet little tirade against David Broderick, after which I told him that it was good to know a man of strong convictions, but I hoped he did not feel the same way about all things foreign: we had a new shipment of a fizzy French wine, from grapes trampled under the feet of girls who went to mass and confessed their sins to the priest. King accepted a glass. Over its rim he studied the happy accidents that were Pauline’s lips and chin and shoulders.

  If I could show her to you as she was then, perhaps you would understand King’s obsession. Or maybe not; there are fashions in figures, faces, and personalities as there are in dresses and hats, and many of the women one generation adores would be wallflowers if they were born in another time. For the men of the 1850s, her petite form was lithe and inviting, her face was lovely and piquant, her movements were seductive, and her eyes hinted that you and she were in a conspiracy together.

  Beauty misleads without lying, like an ambiguous prophecy in a Greek play. We read into it our hopes, to which it is indifferent. We ask it to be true and good, but it has its own way of measuring worth, its own standard and authority.

  At last, one cool evening in October, James King of William grabbed her little hand—she was just over five feet tall—as she passed his chair. “Finally,” she said. He had come alone and early. He was the only guest in the house. Perhaps that gave him the courage to act. I watched them mount the stairs. I had a premonition that it would not go well—Pauline was so careless, he was so sensitive. I could not help wondering why he had delayed so long.

  He had been up in her room for less than ten minutes when I heard shouting, in three different voices: King’s, Pauline’s, and Angelique’s. I knocked on the door. “What’s happening in there?” There was a sound of furniture falling.

  “Unhand me,” I heard James King of William say. I opened the door. Pauline, in silken undergarments, crouched in a corner, face in hands. Angelique had her arm around King’s head. King was naked; he struggled in vain, his face much redder than his soft, white body.

  “Angelique, that’s enough. Let him go.”

  “He’ll strike me,” she said.

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “You won’t, will you, Mr. King? She’ll let you go, and, whatever went wrong here, we’ll all pretend it never happened.”

  “No,” Angelique persisted. “He needs a beating.”

  “Angelique, please,” I said.

  “Show her your face, honey.”

  Pauline took her hands away. Half her face was pink, and her left eye was beginning to swell. That was going to cost us both money. But she was not sobbing, as I had assumed. She looked as if she had a funny little secret to impart to me, and what it was I understood when she cast a quick glance at James King of William’s groin, a place my eyes had until now tactfully avoided.

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I looked away, and I knew I shouldn’t look again, but I did. It was the smallest I’d ever seen. I thought, later that evening, of words I might have said just then to soothe him, but nothing came to mind.

  Knowing Pauline and King, I did not think the mere sight of his diminutive organ would make her laugh. She was too much of a veteran for that; she knew the variety of God’s creation; in her time she’d had to hunt for a penis within fleshy folds so copious that success required all her avarice and dedication to her craft. No, there must have been a time when her eyes flicked toward it in a neutral way and she was observed by King—here was the moment he had dreaded, the reason he had hesitated so long—and he gave her one of his imperious looks. That would have been the funny part. He was so sensitive that that merest trace of amusement would have been enough to infuriate him. He struck her, she cried out, and Angelique, whose room connected with Pauline’s—for they were very particular friends—came to her rescue.

  “Let him go,” I repeated, and finally she did. “Both of you, leave,” I said, and I looked the other way while King got dressed.

  It was my intention to smooth his feathers, but before I had spoken three words he said, “Shut up,” and after a few attempts, each merely increasing his shame and fury, I left, and waited for him to manage his own exit.

  LIV

  IN ’52, THE MINES BEGAN TO YIELD gold again. Good times were back. Clipper ships and covered wagons brought immigrants; steamboats returned others to the States. Old faces kept giving way to new ones, for whom San Francisco had the anonymity, the loneliness, and the freedom of a great metropolis. Over their h
eads, by secret signs, the residents of a more lasting and intimate city saluted each other. We—the madams, the gamblers, the politicians, the merchants, the bankers—remained year after year, like the faculty of a university or the proprietors of a great hotel. Conflicts among the members of this permanent city, supposedly about crime or the condition of the wharves, were really about the money in the pockets of those transients who spent a little time here and went home in defeat or victory. Yet we were not simply, not only cynical. We loved our great hotel. The hills kept bringing the whole city before our eyes. At every turn we saw wide vistas, many levels, streets paved with long wooden planks, lined with street lamps, choked with people, carts, and horses; a thousand rooftops, giant signs painted on bricks, black smoke rising slantwise from chimneys; factories; wharves; fleets of ships. We could not escape a feeling of civic pride. It had all happened so quickly, yet it looked as if it had always been here.

  With still relatively few women in the town, and most of them prostitutes, there wasn’t much home life. Our home was the city. It was normal to sleep in lodging houses and eat in restaurants. Pedestrians threaded their way through the merchants’ wares that spilled out of doors each morning, and as in a town of the Middle Ages, there were unlimited excuses for pageantry: a political rally, a new fire engine, a march by the Sons of Temperance, the launch of a hot-air balloon. There were children now, precious and spoiled, flying kites, fishing through holes in the wharf, running with torches before the fire engines. Wives and maidens could be seen shopping on Commercial Street and picnicking on Meiggs Wharf. It was said constantly that when there were enough of them, these respectable, white Christian women were going to civilize us.

  During this second boom, when everything seemed substantial and lasting, and steamships and the Panama Railroad made the journey quicker, big theatrical names began to show up in San Francisco. I was mad about them. I dined with the actors, generally at the residence of Tom Gallagher—not at my house—but they knew who I was. I was a part of their Western adventure. I met the Booths, but not John Wilkes; he never made it this far west. I have sometimes wondered if I had, and he had held my hand and drunk up my eyes with his, whether I would have sensed the dark deed abiding within him, awaiting a war and a president. I met Murdoch. James Murdoch—please don’t say you’ve never even heard of Murdoch. How awful, when we all loved him so. He was wonderful in The School for Scandal, but he didn’t shoot Lincoln and is forgotten.

  As for the actresses and lady singers, I had candid chats with them in their dressing rooms. They did not have supper with me. In the fifties, these ladies were not yet confident that the public appreciated the difference between prostitutes and actresses. Trying to be respectable, they were less inclined than their counterparts today to keep pet tigers, bathe in milk, or cultivate an association with the demimonde (which many of them knew well enough from earlier phases in their careers). Lola Montez, then fluttering pulses and outraging clergymen with her notorious spider dance, was an agreeable exception. I have only good things to say about Lola Montez. But when Ingrid Strom was in town—the Swedish nightingale, at the end of her triumphant American tour, with theaters, towns, and children named after her at every stop—I was prevented even from going backstage to meet her. I was told that when she heard that the wicked madam Belle Cora was in the audience and would no doubt want to meet her, for Belle Cora always went backstage to meet the performers, she shut her eyes, shook her head rapidly like a spoiled child in a tantrum, and begged to be protected from me! I don’t even know if this report was true. Maybe it was her manager who thwarted me. In any case, I was deliberately delayed, three nights in a row, and each time when I got to her dressing room—a room I knew as well as my own, I had been to it so often—she was gone. She had run away from me—imagine!—when all I wanted to do was to give her the urgent message that she was wonderful and that I, Belle Cora, was refined and sensitive enough to appreciate her. As ridiculous as it seems now, I was deeply hurt, and for years I could not hear the name Ingrid Strom, or see it in print, without feeling the pang of an insult unavenged; I searched newspapers from distant cities in the hope of reading a bad review of her performances. Alas, nobody ever said anything bad about Ingrid Strom; there was a conspiracy that she was perfect, though if you look at the photographs it is evident that she was already becoming portly and had a peasant’s nose, rather like a potato growing in the middle of her face.

  I BECAME MODERATELY RICH, and I acquired, quite cheaply, many deeds to property on the hills—then despised, later choice—so that today I’m very rich. I owned three boarding houses, a laundry, shares in a shipyard, and shares in a wharf that one year brought me more money than the parlor house, but the next year the developer disappeared with all my profits. In ’53, I began to notice a sad trend in my principal industry. One by one, the little French courtesans working out of their own apartments came under the control of pimps, and men became silent partners in most of the brothels. I eluded this fate. I closed my old house and opened up a new one, the grandest yet seen in the city, on Pike Street, which is now called Waverly Place. It stood one block away from the ground the post office had occupied three years earlier. Charley and Lewis made it their permanent residence, and their presence in the house discouraged men who might otherwise have tried to take my business from me.

  I saw Edward once a month, and through him I learned of my grandmother’s death, after a long illness, in ’53, and my grandfather’s death, which occurred during an afternoon nap around six months later, at the beginning of ’54. Robert was the executor of the estate. Along with substantial bequests to charity, every grandchild but one received tens of thousands of dollars and an income of around $1,250 per annum from rental property managed by Robert. Even Lewis, the other black sheep of the family, received his share. I was not mentioned. You will say, how could I be surprised? I had not expected anything; I did not need anything. Yet, when I learned of my absence from the will, it was as if my grandfather had reached up from the grave and across a continent to strike me a final blow.

  Back in Livy, Anne had hurt me, too, though more gently. It had become my habit to write letters to young Frank, who was now beginning to read. I called myself his godmother, and along with the letters and on holidays I would send him presents—a small telescope, a set of toy soldiers, a stereoscope viewer, a collection of rare crystals found in the vicinity of the gold fields, etc., etc., and, best of all, packed very carefully in cloth and old newspapers, two framed photographs of myself (one just the head, and the other down to the waist) beautifully dressed and coiffed, in rich, respectable surroundings. I signed my letters Mrs. Arabella Dickinson—the explanation for my wealth being that I had become first the wife, and promptly afterward the widow, of a San Francisco banker of that name.

  When Anne wrote nowadays, she was more candid than she had been in her earlier letters, because she knew that Jeptha wasn’t going to read them. But she was elliptical by habit, and always gentle, because that was her nature, and thus when she did write plainly the effect was more abrasive than another woman’s curses. One day I got a letter from her saying, about as nicely as such a thing could be put, that I must stop sending presents. “It causes talk in the school and town. I’d go on hiding it from you if I could, dear. The problem is that people here have a pretty good idea that Frank is your child. I don’t know how they know, but they know, and if they’re my friends they don’t talk about it, but not everybody is a friend. Every time you send an expensive present it stirs up talk again. We let him have the stereoscope. We put the crystals in the eaves. We couldn’t make ourselves throw out something so beautiful. Anyway, when packages arrive at the general store, folks see the postmarks and the return address, and that stirs up talk. Of course we want to hear from you, and we want to tell you how Frank is doing. I have thought of a way to avoid this, if you are willing. From now on, let the envelopes have your brother Edward’s return address on them, and let them be sent to Agatha. Agath
a will pass them on to me unopened. That way there’s no talk and it will be easier on Frank in the long run. And please don’t send any more presents.”

  I had opened this letter expecting a description of Frank’s delight with my latest gifts, and by the time I was done with it, my head was swimming and I had to lie down. A couple hours later, Charley found me insensible on my bed, and picked up the letter from the carpet and read it. While I wept on his shoulder, he stroked my hair and patted my back, saying, “That was hard, all right. Maybe she’s right, but that was a hard one.”

  Anne had suggested that I make use of Edward in this subterfuge because I had mentioned that I was seeing him more often. And Edward saw Jeptha fairly often, because the Herald sent him as a matter of routine to cover the founding of civic institutions, and, as people who paid attention to such things knew, Jeptha Talbot was the principal force behind the creation of the Protestant Orphan Asylum, the Temperance Society, and the Protestant Drunkard’s Mission, which did a great deal of practical good on its own account and because its existence prompted the archdiocese to set up a competing Catholic Drunkard’s Mission. Sometimes Edward would meet Jeptha for lunch at a restaurant in town, and sometimes he dined with Agnes and Jeptha at their home in Happy Valley.