Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  He paused, casting his mind back, I supposed. “I burned. All day long. Over you. Philippe. My religion was supposed to help.” He rubbed his neck with his hand and didn’t speak for a while. “I was too proud to accept the consolation I urged on everyone else. It seemed more honest to soothe myself with whiskey. I don’t remember writing to her, but it couldn’t have been just a mistake I made while drunk. I was flailing about; I needed to stop flailing; I needed someone to stop it.”

  We lay there a moment, staring at the ceiling and contemplating all that, and then he continued: “Turns out it isn’t so easy to toss aside your religion. After we struck gold, I started hearing a voice, inside my head but very persistent, calling me like Jonah, telling me to take that gold and build a church with it, and preach the Word. I drank to drown out the voice. I drowned it out with drink by night and with a hangover by day. Agnes came. I stopped drinking. I listened. The voice, which I knew was just another way of thinking, the voice wasn’t telling me the Bible was all true. It wasn’t telling me about the truth of any creed. It was telling me that there was a spirit in me and a spirit in the world, and I should honor it by making myself useful to people in the best way I know how, and to be as true as I could to the people who had educated me and sent me here, even if they might not think I was doing that by starting a Unitarian church in San Francisco.”

  “But marry her, Jeptha?”

  “I was drowning. She was my lifeboat. And I thought, At least one of us will be happy.”

  “And she had traveled two thousand miles.”

  “There was that, too.”

  We managed to see each other once or twice a month, no more, sometimes out of town, sometimes, with various subterfuges, on the outskirts of town. I had a lot of freedom to move about, and I did not think that Charley suspected anything. And so we rolled along until the trivial incident between Charley and General William H. Richardson, which led to the formation of the Second San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. Soon we were fighting to save the life of the man I had betrayed.

  LV

  IT WAS A DAY IN NOVEMBER 1855, either six or seven years into the Gold Rush, depending on when you date its beginning. I had turned twenty-seven, and in exactly one month it would be six years since I had stood on the deck of the Juniper and watched the mist clear to reveal a bedraggled city of mud and tents and shacks spread out in a crescent on the bay. I woke up at around eleven, Charley woke up around noon, and we had our separate days. We had a plan to meet at seven that evening to go to a show.

  At six-thirty, with the help of my lady’s maid, I dressed, choosing my garments with a consciousness of my duty toward a following of respectable ladies who took their ideas of fashion from the town’s best-dressed prostitutes and madams. They hated me. They wished their men would not visit my house. But we had a tacit understanding in this one matter, and I arrayed myself as much for them as for anyone else, in a walking dress of patterned blue organdy, a small scarf mantelet of embroidered lace, and a bonnet of fancy straw, blond lace, and crepe flowers. Describing it now, I realize how ridiculous a woman would look wearing it today.

  Charley and I walked arm in arm a distance of several blocks to the American Theatre—our theatre, as we thought of it—then located on the intersection of Sansome and Halleck. We had attended hundreds of performances by scores of famous actors there. We were friends with the manager, and had been loyal to the place in its two previous incarnations—for, like so many San Francisco institutions, it had been destroyed more than once. Each time, we had mourned, and then rejoiced at the news that it would be rebuilt. It was now more beautiful than ever, as fine as anything in New York, with two thousand seats, thick carpets, red velvet curtains, gilt borders, bas-reliefs of scrolls and medallions and painted wooden infants tugging painted wooden drapes. House and stage lights were coal gas; earlier that year, with much fanfare, management had installed a complicated mechanism consisting of a block of lime, an oxy-hydrogen flame torch, and numerous mirrors, able to envelop a lone actor in a brilliant cone of light that followed him across the stage—I cannot exaggerate the astonished animal delight with which audiences in our upstart city greeted this effect that is so commonplace today, and which made pleasurable the performance of many a mediocre play and cast.

  The play, called Nicodemus; or The Unfortunate Fisherman, was a performance by the Amazing Ravels, a French troupe beloved for their feats in gymnastics, ballet, and pantomime. There was a man on a tightrope, and a clown walking a chalk line across the floor in imitation of him, and it was well done, but at the midpoint of the performance a misunderstanding occurred which diverted my attention from the rest of the show. Two fools way down below us, in the pit, were trying to catch my eye. One wagged his hat over his head. Smiling, I waved my hand, and Charley waved, too, to remind them that he was there and to keep their enthusiasm within bounds, but even after that, from time to time they looked back at us again.

  Two rows forward of us in the gallery sat William H. Richardson, who had supported the presidential ambitions of Franklin Pierce at the Democratic National Convention and as reward had been made United States Marshal for the Northern District of California. To his left, in a dress not unlike one I had worn in ’52, was his new wife, Sarah, a recent arrival to our state; seated to her left was her friend Jane Matthews. Mrs. Richardson was small, bony, with a narrow bosom, a hatchet face, and protuberant eyes. If she’d been here in ’49 or ’50, the men of San Francisco would have slogged through acres of mud to gawk at her; but not anymore. Women were still outnumbered by men, but they weren’t scarce enough to be mistaken for angels. Her friend Jane noticed the men in the pit and touched Sarah’s elbow: Jane was so homely that both assumed the men were leering at Sarah. With apparently enough force to hurt, Mrs. Richardson rammed her elbow into her husband’s arm. He turned. She pointed to the pit. “See that?” Charley asked me. I nodded. Richardson, a little bulldog of a man, rose to his feet; mumbling something, he stepped over many pairs of legs and went up the aisle. A minute later, we were looking down at the top of his head; he was in the pit, talking to the fools, presumably telling them to stop annoying his wife. “Now they’ll all look up,” I told Charley, and they turned their faces up to us and toward Mrs. Richardson. They understood—oh—and, it was evident, they apologized for the misunderstanding and explained that I was Belle Cora, well-known madam of a fancy house on Pike Street, and they had been gawking at me, not at his lovely wife. Jane and Sarah were watching this pantomime and seemed to understand the kind of mistake that had been made. At any rate, Jane turned toward me, and so did Sarah Richardson, and then she turned away, flushing. She did not yet know who I was; she only knew that the gods, for their amusement, had given me the beauty that ought to have been hers. Her husband went back up the aisle, and a few minutes later he was in the gallery again, talking to Mrs. Richardson. Then that silly tin-hearted woman, with her delicate self-regard, turned toward me, furious, and spoke my name—not addressing me, merely pinning the syllables on me—“Belle Cora.”

  She spoke heatedly to her husband. After a moment he turned and said to Charley, loud enough for the Ravels to hear, “The woman with you is Belle Cora. She runs a disorderly house.” I suppose that was meant as a preface to his remarks. He meant that he knew what we were, and our proper place was the soiled dovecote of the third tier.

  Charley said, “Are you trying to save me from her?” People around us laughed, and Charley put his arm around me and said, “Don’t worry about me. I like this kind of danger.”

  Richardson smiled back, while saying: “Get out. Both of you. Get out of the theater. I am General William H. Richardson. I’m the U.S. marshal.”

  In our section of the gallery, most people were watching us and ignoring the show.

  Charley stood up. “General William H. Richardson, you tried to help me, so let me help you. You’re letting your wife tell you what to do, and that would be fine if she was giving you good advice, but she ain’t. She’s
making you look like a jackass. So I say, don’t listen to her. Sit down. Watch the Frenchmen.”

  “William?” said Mrs. Richardson to her husband in a tone that reminded him of his duty.

  “Don’t you talk about my wife,” said the marshal.

  “Don’t talk about mine,” said Charley. We were not married, but Charley called me “Mrs. Cora,” and referred to me as his wife, and that was why I was known as Belle Cora. Richardson sat down. His wife hissed in his ear; he hissed back. After a while, he left his seat again, was gone for ten minutes, came back, and spoke to his wife. He may have had a drink in the meantime, because he didn’t bother to keep his voice down, and he turned his head to glower at us as often as he looked at her. “He won’t. They come here all the time. He’d rather lose us than them.”

  He had spoken to the manager. We had known the manager of the American Theatre since it was built. We remembered the first American Theatre, built on landfill then so infirm that the whole house had sunk several feet from the weight of the opening-night audience—we were there—and after that, at high tide, the patrons had to walk over a plank bridge inside the theater to get to the show. We had seen the city burn six times. We were forty-niners. Mrs. Richardson was the Johnny-come-lately.

  “I knew it. I should have talked to him,” she said. Down on the stage, the Ravels were doing a selection from a famous ballet, but I gave all my attention to Mrs. Richardson. Suddenly she said, “My mother,” and then she stopped herself and wept silently, now and then sniffing and wiping her eyes on the backs of her white gloves. He touched her elbow. She jerked it away from him. A minute later, she said in an out-of-doors voice, “I could have married Francis Randolph Hayes. I could be Mrs. Francis Randolph Hayes.” She stood up, and here is where, I have to say, she made a spectacle of herself, looking out at the audience as if accusing them all. “American Theatre, indeed. Nothing but a great big cathouse, that’s what it is, really. Cathouse!”

  From above and below, from left and right, people peered at her through opera glasses, elbowed their neighbors, pointed, and grinned. She was causing herself serious, lasting damage. She tugged at her friend Jane’s arm, saying, “I won’t stay a minute longer in this cathouse,” and Jane got up, and Richardson got up and followed them out. As they left, I heard her mutter, “U.S. marshal. U.S. marshal indeed.”

  WHEN THE SHOW WAS OVER, we walked to the El Dorado, which had been rebuilt for the third time, grander than ever. We went up to the balcony, from which we could eat and drink while watching the smalltime gamblers milling around the bar, the roulette wheels and the faro tables and the monte tables. Up here, there were well-appointed rooms with carpets and potted plants and spittoons and windows, but usually the shades were down and a few oil lamps sufficed for illumination. To be in these rooms, wagering fantastic sums, winning without vainglory, losing without complaint, was a matter of pride to the big men of San Francisco.

  We ordered steak, oysters, caviar, and champagne. Big Pete spotted us and came and sat at our table. We told him what had happened at the American Theatre. He said that he had met Richardson: about time somebody put him in his place. Big Pete looked over the rail and said, “Speaking of shit, look what’s coming through the door.” Charley and I looked down in time to glimpse the face of the man who had just entered the El Dorado. “I know him,” said Big Pete. “Owns a bear.”

  “Abner Mosely,” said Charley. We had both seen him before, at a match in which Mosely’s fighting bear, Kicks, had competed against a bull. He had been here since ’47. He was a veteran of the Mexican War. He had had many little doomed business ventures, but his luck seemed to be changing. The bear had won.

  As he walked nearer the faro table, which was just below us, his hat gradually eclipsed his face. He walked out of view entirely. Then he reappeared on the second floor and approached our table. He was a man whose looks gave a perfectly accurate account of him. His short nose proudly displayed its hairy nostrils. In his wet mouth, whenever it was open, one saw acres of gum and Niagaras of saliva. He had freckly skin and a bushy red beard.

  “Just the folks I came to see,” he said, apportioning a hideous leer evenly among Big Pete, Charley, and me. “Gonna clean you out. Ready for that?”

  “All right,” said Big Pete, running an oversized finger across the irregular brim of his absurd hat. “Only, suppose we win. What do we get? I’ve got no use for a bear. What about you, Charley?”

  Mosely said he’d have us know he had the money, thanks to Kicks, who had surprised a lot of folks who didn’t know as much about bears as they thought they did. He was here to play, and this was going to be his night.

  “All right,” said Charley, and Pete said, “We’ll take your money.”

  And Abner Mosely, because he was insulted, because he thought it might rattle Charley, and finally because he just liked to be disgusting, said that with the money he won from this game he planned to spend a night of rapture with me.

  Immediately, yet it was not unexpected, I felt Charley’s hand release me. The legs of his heavy chair made a sort of musical groan as Charley shoved it a few inches back across the hardwood floor. He rose to his feet, and walked briskly to Mosely, who flinched when Charley put an arm around his shoulder. Mosely was probably armed. So was Big Pete, who put his hands in his trouser pockets and watched alertly, and so was Charley, who said gently, as if talking to an errant nephew: “Mr. Mosely, you need to realize that you are in the El Dorado now, not some low gambling hell. We don’t talk that way here. Besides, you didn’t realize you are speaking of Mrs. Cora. Now that you do realize, I guess maybe you want to say you’re sorry.”

  “I won’t dance to your tune so easy,” said Mosely, pulling away and showing us his slimy mouth.

  “Of course you won’t, Mr. Mosely,” said Charley. “You’re a proud man, who knows about bears. But if you don’t say you’re sorry, Mr. Hughes here will ask you to leave the El Dorado and not come back. And you won’t win my money in a poker game. That’s what you really want, ain’t it? Unless, maybe, maybe, you’ve decided that this place is too rich for your blood, and you are looking for an excuse to leave.”

  Mosely appeared to think about that. Perhaps there was some truth in it. Certainly he had been over his head from the moment he had come through the door. He bowed to me with mocking ceremony. “Madam, my humble apologies.” Looking from Big Pete to Charley, he said, for the second time, “Gonna clean you out.” But I could see he was scared, as he had every right to be, and he went into the game hoping that things were not as they appeared to be and would turn out better than they usually did.

  I remained at the El Dorado, for the pleasure of seeing Mosely when they were done with him. A waiter brought me coffee and some sweet biscuits. Someone had left an old edition of a fat British paper that serialized novels: in this issue, part of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I occupied myself with it. I had not read the earlier episodes, and there was no synopsis, so I had to guess at the parts of the plot I had missed. What made this count so determined? Why was this other man scared of him?

  Another, much slimmer journal peeked out from behind a napkin: it was the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, edited by my old acquaintance James King of William. King’s bank had failed, ruining hundreds of people, including him, and badly tarnishing his reputation. He had turned all the opprobrium onto his former associates, by writing letters to San Francisco newspapers, which helped to save his name and had the incidental effect of bringing his talent for vituperation to the attention of the public. Only last month, with the backing of some Know-Nothing merchants, he had started the Bulletin, full of gossip, scandal, and highly personal attacks on local politicians. It sold briskly. Charley and I both read it. It often mentioned friends of ours.

  The band played downstairs; waiters came and went. Laughter and curses emerged from behind the door to the little room where Big Pete and Charley and a few others were playing with Mosely. When I say they were playing with him, I mean
like a toy. At last the door opened. Mosely staggered out, followed by the men who had his money, and who also had, I learned later, a makeshift but legal bill of sale for his fighting bear. He looked at me blindly. I said, “I’m ready, Mr. Mosely. Do you have the money?” Laughter.

  Big Pete spoke to a waiter, who went downstairs first, and I watched from the balcony as Mosely made his way under the chandeliers and past the roulette wheel and the faro table. The waiter, having spoken to the bartender, handed Mosely a big bottle of whiskey, telling him it was on the house; Mosely took it without a word and stumbled into Portsmouth Square. Later, he claimed that he had been cheated. I don’t doubt it. As events were soon to show, he was on a winning streak.

  THE NEXT DAY, I LEFT CHARLEY at noon to stop at the post office, where I picked up a letter from Anne, and I read it on the carriage ride home. Frank, whom she referred to, in every letter, as “the precious gift you brought us from New York,” would be eight years old in three months. He had shown himself so bright that he was already attending the winter school and using the fourth-grade reader, and the teacher, a young widow, doted on him, as proved by the fact that she had intervened to stop a fight between Frank and another boy, who was only half a year older than Frank but much bigger and stronger because of Frank’s illness, which had worried us so much last year. The doctor—Livy had one now—had said that Frank was not consumptive, and would catch up in growth. Though delicate, Frank was brave, as one could tell by the things he dared to say to larger children.

  I put the letter in my lap, and, as usual with Anne’s letters, I tried to guess what she had left unsaid. It had to do with his character, I supposed. Five traits emerged consistently. He was “quick,” frail, stubborn, acquisitive, and tactless (he had often hurt the feelings of Anne’s daughter, Susannah, who doted on him). I did not know whether to count it a sixth trait, or simply the logical outcome of the others, that he was evidently friendless: if he had friends, Anne would certainly have mentioned them. Anne always put everything in the best possible light. I wondered if he was a sissy, or a loner, or just unlikable.