Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  Jeptha had been very eager for Edward to visit. “It will do her good,” he had told my brother (who told me, when we had lunch). “It will take her out of herself.” Edward had expected to find Agnes sad, or at least quiet, but over dinner she was lively—only, he said, strangely rapid in her speech, and he noted in Jeptha a nervousness, a springy readiness to intervene, whenever Agnes directed the conversation toward the possibility, as she put it, “of communicating with other worlds,” or with “those who have left the physical plane.” Edward told me that ever since the loss of their only child shortly after it was born, this had been her obsession, and Jeptha hated it.

  “Her brother Titus is a spiritualist, too,” I noted.

  “She caught it from him,” said Edward, nodding. “He writes to her.”

  Anne, in her letters, sometimes passed on news of my cousins in Livy and Patavium; and from her I had learned that Titus and his wife, after the death of their four-year-old girl, had begun inviting friends to sit holding hands around a table in a darkened room, and to listen for raps, hoping for news of their daughter. Eventually, they had sought the assistance of a spirit medium from Rochester, who for no charge except the price of her trip had passed on the message that little Laurie was growing and thriving in the Summer-Land; that she had playmates, was looked after by older spirits, was learning to read and figure; that she visited them and stood by their chairs at the dinner table, or sat at the foot of her father’s chair while he was doing the store’s accounts. Laurie had tried to speak with them to tell them not to mourn, and in fact, though they were unconscious of it, it was her gentle prompting that had led them to contact the medium so that they might learn the truth and rejoice.

  An individual who converses with the dead, or thinks the world will soon end, is not counted insane if, nearby, many thousands of others share this same belief. However, whenever such a sect does spring up, crazy people are drawn to it, hiding themselves in a throng of believers like brown deer in the autumnal forest. Apparently, it was Jeptha’s conviction that Agnes was one of those. He considered her attraction to the new teaching a symptom of mental disorder, brought on by her repeated failures in childbearing.

  There had been three miscarriages, two soon after the quickening, one brought halfway to term, and an infant born blue, whose headstone in the churchyard bore the unusual inscription “Jonathan Talbot. born February 9, 1853. TRANSLATED February 11, 1853.” Several months later, at a séance in the house of the wife of the owner of the San Francisco Water Works, Agnes established communication with Jonathan and some older spirits, the souls of a wagon maker and his wife, who had become his adoptive parents in the afterlife; and together all these spirits were working to solve the mystery of the curse on Agnes’s womb.

  EDWARD LEARNED THIS OVER A SERIES of meetings, a few more pathetic facts each time. Jeptha hated Agnes to talk about any of it, yet it was certainly preferable to the melancholy which had earlier afflicted her, when for weeks at a stretch sometimes she would refuse to rise from her bed and would eat only when Jeptha spoon-fed her. On other subjects, she made perfect sense, Edward reminded me, and she could be very good with the poor and the sick. Jeptha did what he could to involve her in this sort of work, and he hoped that whatever this was would pass as she overcame her grief; most of all, he hoped she would get the child she so desperately wanted, though he dreaded the suspense of another pregnancy.

  Edward told me about this when we met one afternoon at the Clipper, a restaurant on Washington Street popular with workingmen because they could get three dishes for a quarter; because a little railway—a scientific marvel—ran the length of the room, conveying plates of food from the kitchen to the tables; and, finally, because of the dexterity of the waiters, who with two long-handled tin pots would pour coffee and hot milk simultaneously into one’s cup from a thrilling height.

  “I feel sorry for them,” Edward said, stretching the words a little, so that he seemed to mean: I can understand why you, on the other hand, might feel differently.

  “He doesn’t have much luck with wives, does he?”

  “I guess not,” Edward agreed cautiously.

  “Do they ever mention me?”

  “No.”

  “Does he know you and I are in touch?”

  “I feel sure he does.”

  “But he doesn’t ask after me.”

  “No. But after all …”

  “What?”

  “He knows. You are known.”

  By this time, Edward had become a part of our circle; he was on good terms with Charley, with Big Pete Hughes, Ned McGowan, and many people we both knew. So I said, “Edward, do me a favor, will you, don’t tell anyone we have spoken about Jeptha.”

  “Well, of course,” he said.

  “I mean, don’t even tell Charley,” I said.

  I PICTURED THEIR HOME LIFE, its dreary apprehensions, its moments of humor and tenderness. I pictured it one way; I turned it around and pictured it differently. I could see his anxious face when she began to talk strangely, or when he wondered whether it was wrong to let her harbor a belief he considered foolish; or him in the bed beside her, hesitant to start, and her hoping and fearing. If ever copulation had been chastised, theirs had, and there had to be a shadow over it for both of them. Did he ever think about our happy days aboard the Juniper? Surely now and then he must.

  A few days after my conversation with Edward at the Clipper, I woke much earlier than I was used to. I sat up and looked at Charley in the bed, sleeping with his mouth open, one arm bent across his chest, and the other flung out straight, with the hand dangling over the bed. I had a tender feeling for him. I loved him, but not in the same way I loved Jeptha. He could never torment me as Jeptha could. I was ashamed of what I was planning to do.

  I walked to the window, which was misty, and raised it; a chilly breeze came into the room, making me feel lonely and fearful of the rush of time. I watched the fog rolling in from the bay; how fast it came, ghostly battalions enveloping the masts and yardarms of the ships and the chimneys of the houses and pushing through the streets, looking for me, looking for my truth, looking for my heart.

  Later that day, I wrote to Jeptha.

  Dear Friend,

  I have learned in conversation with my brother that your poor wife is behaving and speaking very strangely, so much so that he is worried about her, and I am sure that you are worried, too. As you know, your wife and I grew up together on the same farm. I am very familiar with her character, and I believe that I have knowledge which will be of great value in helping to mend her disordered mind. We should meet, don’t you agree? In view of the differences in our stations now, I suppose it would be better if we met clandestinely, perhaps out of town. I know of a tavern in Sacramento City where we could discuss delicate matters in private.

  Sincerely,

  Arabella

  Jeptha replied two days later. A few more terse messages went back and forth between us, and a week later, I took a steamboat to Sacramento City. I arrived at the tavern first and waited outside, wearing kid gloves and holding a silk parasol, and nodding to acknowledge the approving glances of the men who passed by. At last, Jeptha approached, in a frock coat too heavy for the weather, walking with his hands in his pockets. He looked at me warily and gave me a small unfriendly nod, as if we knew each other but not well. I made him take my arm, and he walked with me very stiffly into the tavern. We sat down, and I ordered a sarsaparilla, he a whiskey, which he didn’t touch for a long time.

  There he was, fifteen inches away from me, for the first time in five years, and, like a thief taking a look around a bank he plans to rob tomorrow, I took a surreptitious inventory of his face: the high brow, the thick eyebrows, the ice-blue eyes in their hawklike setting. There he was. Still there.

  “My grandfather died,” I said, to break the silence.

  “Yes, I heard,” he said, giving me a glimpse of the little gap in his mouth made by the ancient chip in his tooth. He hesitated: he
had mixed feelings about my grandfather, and he knew that I did, too. “He was an interesting man. He did many good things.”

  “He disinherited me.”

  To that Jeptha said nothing, and the conversation continued in this lifeless manner until he finally said, “What did you have to say about Agnes?”

  I smiled. “I think you know that I didn’t bring you here to talk about Agnes. Do you believe everything you read?” He scowled and stood up. “Stop. Wait.” A little more slowly than necessary, with my left hand I pulled the kid glove off my right hand, and placed my hand over his, stroking his thumb with my own. “I have rented a room upstairs,” I said quietly. “Come with me, up to the room. Come with me, and if you don’t know why you are here, why, I’ll do my very best to explain it.”

  I rose and looked at him, waiting. At last he stood, and put his hand to his brow, and dropped it to his side, and I led the way and he followed me. When we were in the room, with its small bed, and I had locked the door, I said, “Don’t take off your clothes yet. Stand there a moment.” I put my hand on his lips, and kissed them lightly. “Don’t kiss me back yet. Don’t move a muscle. Not yet. Don’t move.” I slipped a hand into his shirt and up his chest. I dipped my fingers into his trousers. “What do you think of me, Jeptha? What do you think of my character?”

  “You’re loathsome,” he said.

  “I see how you loathe me,” I said, gripping him. I let go and turned, inviting him to undo the small hooks at the back of my dress.

  I could estimate, just from the temperature of his breath on my hair, how far he stood from me when he performed this task. He stood at arm’s length. In my narrow shelf aboard the Juniper, he had raced through the unfastening. But now he seemed to have taken my cue that everything should be done slowly and cruelly. A hook came undone, and there was a wait so long that I began to wonder if he had changed his mind and was going to leave the room. Then, quickly, the next hook. My knees vibrated. I began to turn. He gripped my shoulders and turned me away again, and I waited for him to undo the next hook.

  The bed thumped and migrated across the floor, etching marks into the soft pine floorboards. Our coupling was angry. It wasn’t a reconciliation; it was a fight. Our bodies traded insults and recriminations; his body spat out its contempt for me. Then we rested. Then we did it again, twice more, and we didn’t talk at all except when I asked him if he thought he was done for the day. When he said he was, I said, “You go first. I’ll let you know when I think it’s time for another discussion.” I looked at him while he got into his clothes and went out, and then I stood at the window and watched until he had left the tavern and was walking up the wooden street and turned a corner. It was late in the day, under a clear sky, and the people and the horses down there had long shadows that they pushed or dragged, depending on whether they walked up the street or down. I stood at the window a little longer, watching the people come and go, and then I sat on the bed for a long time, doing nothing.

  I TOLD CHARLEY THAT I WAS THINKING of opening up another house in Sacramento City. Using this excuse, I went there every other week, and Jeptha and I would go up to a little room to satisfy our animal need for each other. We did not speak very much. All the words we said to each other over the course of the first few months were like one conversation, like a series of messages sent back and forth by carrier pigeon. I would ask him, one week, how he felt when he went home after our little meetings. He would reply two weeks later, as if that much time had been needed to investigate the matter, that he felt rotten. He was betraying his wife. He was betraying all the people who believed in him.

  Another time he said, as if talking to himself, “They should see me now. Rutting like a dog with the worst woman in California.”

  I thought about that for a while, and then said: “I see. You do this so you, at least, will know what you are really like.”

  He nodded, and I was going to say more, but he put his hand over my mouth.

  At our next meeting I said, “You do it to degrade yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, in that case, you must do things with me that no good man would ever do with any woman, especially not with his wife.”

  He agreed. Naturally, I had to lead in this, since I had so much more experience with degradation, and over the course of a few months, I proceeded to unlock cupboard after cupboard, door after door, opening to him the whole treasury of human sexual depravity, everything a man and a woman can do, everything known to me as a harlot and a bawd. While we were doing it, at a moment when my mouth happened to be free, I asked him, “Do you ever think how I learned all these tricks?”

  “Yes,” he groaned, thrusting harder.

  “And do you think of the men who taught them to me?”

  “Yes, and shut up,” he said, and pushed my face into the pillow, and I laughed, and then I groaned like a dying woman and grunted like a pig.

  During all that time, not a single kind word ever passed between us. Both of us had to rid ourselves of burdens we had carried for years. I had to be rid of my desire to win, to triumph over Agnes and revenge myself on him. He had to be rid of the illusion that he was being with me in order to be dirty, to live a truth that fit his low opinion of himself. That’s what we did, time after time, over the course of several months. When all those impulses were burned away, we were left with the fact, at once comforting and uncomfortable, that we were in love. It crept up on us so slowly that there arose a secret bashfulness between us in the midst of our debauch—whether to express tenderness, whether the feeling would be returned—until one day, afterward, he held me gently and kissed me as one would a sleeping child. I lifted my hand to his cheek, looking at him. The tender touch given and returned brought the happy, lucky thrill that two love-smitten children might feel the first time they squeezed each other’s hands. Grateful, I wept, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he said, “No, don’t be, no, no, no, no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” stroking my head and kissing the tears away.

  AFTER THAT, OUR PREDICAMENT WAS CONVENTIONAL. His wife had a disordered mind, and was incapable of supporting herself, and he held a position that depended on the purity of his reputation. He told me that he was willing to relinquish them both. I did not believe him. I did not think he himself realized how much he liked the authority and influence that he wielded as a pastor. To leave that would be bad enough; to leave a helpless wife would destroy him. He could not touch the earnings of a madam, and I was not prepared to give them up; I had grown accustomed to luxury and was unwilling to be poor.

  Besides, I couldn’t bear the thought of telling Charley. He would be a man about it, but he would be hurt, and I was ashamed that I was not playing fair with him, after all his kindness to me. Outrageous as it may seem, I did not want to lose him. I loved Charley. I liked having him around me. It made me proud to have this formidable man at my side when I walked down the wooden streets of San Francisco, and it calmed my night fears to have him in my bed. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too.

  So we went on this way.

  Jeptha and I talked more freely, more truthfully, than we could while we were married. I told him many things about my time in New York, though never quite all (never about Jack Cutter); and we reminisced about Livy, and our voyage to California, and the hotel in Rio. Once, I told him, “I’ve lived pretty high, but I never tasted a food I liked as much as the plums we had aboard the Juniper.”

  The next time we met, he brought a jar of plums, and we fed them to each other, face to face, just as we had so long ago. “They’re still good,” I said, tears running down my face.

  “They’re still good,” he agreed, and our foreheads touched.

  I reminded him of the time the Danforths gave us each a copy of the pamphlet Marital Chastity. I told him, for the first time, that I had been worried he would try to live by its principles, and he said that even the Danforths had eyes and must have known how doomed such a plan would be
; he also told me that he knew I had given my copy of the pamphlet to the woman who had given me a Magdalene Society tract a few years ago. “And did you laugh?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t ready to laugh about any of it. You know, Agnes and I had been to see the Danforths before I went with you, and she had received her copy.”

  We talked about Philippe, and how he had died—a grief for Jeptha bigger than the death of his sister Becky, because it had been Jeptha’s fault. “It broke me,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, stroking his face, “I’m not saying it was good, I would never, never say that, but I think it’s the reason we can be together now, talking like this. It’s the reason you can understand me.”

  “I think I have always understood you,” he said.

  “Oh, you did.” I nodded quickly, putting my fist over my heart. “You did when we were children, and when we were happy in Livy you did, you were the only one who did. But then so much happened to me—I did so many desperate things—and I told myself it hadn’t changed me inside, but it had to, didn’t it? I had to die or be remade.” I sat up in the bed, and he watched me and waited while I gathered my thoughts. “You used to say, when you were a Baptist, that we all had to be born again. I used to think of that when we were on the Juniper, that I had been born again, really born again, and you had not.” I was choking and shivering; I could hardly get the words out. He started to speak; I put my hand on his lips. “I thought that was good then. I would hold you, and think that your innocence was my innocence, your goodness was my goodness. But it couldn’t happen that way.”

  He sat up and wrapped his arms around me from behind; I pushed my head back against him, feeling content.

  “We fit before,” he said. “And now we fit again.”

  I told him what Herbert Owen had told me about the letter he had written to Agnes. When I first touched the subject I was careful, since she had been his wife a long time now, and she, too, had suffered, and in her way I guessed she had been remade, but I could not bear to leave the question unanswered. “How could you do it, knowing what she’d done? She did it, you knew she had, she helped ruin me in Livy, and all we’ve suffered since is due to it. Did you hate me that much?”