Belle Cora: A Novel Page 62

  “Lewis, we’re only burying him once,” I admonished him.

  “He won’t mind,” said Lewis, looking at me gently. He considered himself the stronger one now, and for the moment it was true. “I’m going to do something for him.”

  “What? What? Be careful, Lewis,” I said, and Big Pete and Irene seconded me.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Lewis, I’m begging you. I need you to take special care, do you understand me? Any plan you’ve got, you need to let me in on it. Today is Charley’s funeral.”

  I wanted him with me every minute now. I would have wanted him under my eye even if he were not a reckless man sworn to a blood feud. Repeating that I was not to worry, he got out and walked off; the carriage started up again.

  I looked helplessly at Big Pete and Irene. After a while, Pete said, “Right before he stopped the carriage, I told him there was a man at the Cosmopolitan selling pieces of the rope for twenty-five dollars each.”

  “Oh, the dirty dogs,” I said, wringing my hands and rocking. “Oh God, what’s he going to do?”

  “He didn’t say,” said Big Pete.

  Irene put her arms around me. “Lewis is closer kin to you than you let on, ain’t he?” I didn’t answer. “He’s no fool. He’s very able.”

  “So was Charley,” I said.

  The mission lay out of the city back then. We took the Old Mission Road, paved with planks worn down almost to the sand. Breathing dust, we rolled past dunes and chaparral and shacks and gardens, and past a raffish neighborhood of boarding houses, hotels, saloons, racetracks, and cockfighting pits, where Charley and I used to go sometimes, and finally we saw the gaunt old mission building, which, so it was said, had once been the seat of religion and government all rolled into one here. Now the adobe walls were pocked and leprous; according to a painted sign, the long, low building beside it, where the priests used to live, had become the Mission House hotel, and it all looked so shamed and derelict that I wished I had not picked it to be Charley’s final resting place.

  Brown-and-green stone slabs, bearing Spanish inscriptions weathered almost to illegibility, tilted at many angles in the mission yard; a long heap of sandy soil waited beside the pit where Charley was to be buried. We noticed another open grave not five yards away, and just as the one priest still attached to the mission was finishing Charley’s burial service, we heard the approach of James Casey’s much larger funeral cortege, with more carriages, and men and boys on foot, including the firemen of Ten Engine. As we left, they acknowledged us respectfully, and I was touched. In the midst of oppression, one is touched by any small act of kindness.

  When we got back, I told Pete and Irene that I wanted to be alone. I had some whiskey and a few stale crackers and sat trying to realize that Charley wasn’t ever coming back. So often when I was lonely and helpless he had comforted me. I would never have that again, and I was afraid of the changes these feelings would work in me. I ached for Jeptha more than ever, but he was with Agnes.

  The door swung open. And you know how it is when someone dies; for an instant I thought: Charley. It was Jocelyn. We drank together and talked and reminisced. I told her how Lewis had missed the funeral, that he had jumped out of the carriage right after he had heard that a man was selling pieces of the rope Charley was hanged with. “Where do you think he went?” I asked her.

  She sat thinking for a little while, and then said, “Why, to buy the pieces, of course. All of them if he could.”

  I wasn’t thinking very clearly. “I don’t understand. Did you meet him? Did he tell you that?”

  “No. I just know Lewis.”

  THE ALTA CALIFORNIA SAID THAT FATHER ACCOLTI had refused Charley absolution unless we were married. A letter in the Bulletin praised the committee for its work, then added:

  But, gentlemen, one thing more must be done: Belle Cora must be most firmly requested to leave the city. The women of San Francisco have no bitterness toward her, nor do they ask it on her account, but for the good of those who remain, and as an example to others. Every virtuous woman asks that her influence and example be removed from us.

  The truly virtuous of our sex will not feel that the Vigilance Committee have done their whole duty till they comply with the request of

  MANY WOMEN OF SAN FRANCISCO

  A few days after that, the Bulletin printed this compassionate response:

  A woman is always a woman’s persecutor. In my humble opinion, I think that Belle Cora has suffered enough to expiate many faults, in having had torn from her a bosom friend, executed by a powerful association. She has shown herself a true-hearted woman to him, and such a heart covers a multitude of sins. This very circumstance of expulsion might be the means of utter desolation of heart. As for the house of ill-fame she runs, I have heard that it is one of many serving the base appetites of the men of this city. I do not see how the removal of just one, while leaving a hundred others standing, can make our city virtuous.

  AGNES

  “Agnes” was a common name in that generation. There may have been three or four in San Francisco at the time. But I did not doubt the identity of this one.

  The next day’s issue contained the report that Abner Mosely had been found dead in the room of his boarding house. An empty whiskey bottle and several empty packages of medicinal arsenic were discovered near the body, and the coroner said he had died of arsenic poisoning. Mosely was busted and three months late on his rent. Only the Herald, now reduced to a single page, mentioned the rumor that a piece of rope had been found in Mosely’s mouth. The same issue of the Bulletin reported that the corrupt judge Ned McGowan, the hooligan Lewis Godwin, and the notorious madam Belle Cora were wanted for immediate questioning by the Committee of Vigilance.

  By then, my house was empty. My girls were all in Sacramento. Lewis and I were hiding in the house of my first husband and his wife.

  LXII

  WE LIVED IN THE ATTIC. If we went into other rooms, we had to creep on the floor whenever we passed windows, which were left with the shades up: otherwise, the neighbors might notice that something was different. Since there were two windows on the stairs and we took all our meals in the kitchen, I must have crept under a window over a thousand times, my palms on the runner, my eyes inches from a place where a knot reminded me of a hawk’s eye, and another place where the planks were loosely joined and I could see the corner of a desk on the floor below.

  A porch and a line of trees hid the inside of the kitchen from the neighbors’ sight, and it was in this room, during our second week in hiding, that Agnes began telling us about the afterlife. She spoke not as a lunatic exhibiting her symptom, but as a hostess making conversation. I had given her the excuse—I had asked her about it. But I knew she had been dying to tell me; and once she began and warmed to the topic, I could sense, woven through and around the authentic heartaches of dead and unborn children, her old love of having expert knowledge and monopolizing our attention.

  The maid, Phoebe, short and plump (in this she resembled her mistress), ladled split-pea soup into the bowls set before me, Jeptha, Agnes, and Lewis, while Agnes told us how the transition from life to afterlife was depicted in the book Geography of the Spirit World, by the noted clairvoyant James Victor Andersen. What we call “death” is really the moment when the spirit body (visible to certain gifted individuals) leaves the earthly body, according to Mr. Andersen. “Just over the head of the dying person there is a slowly throbbing ethereal emanation attached by a slender life-thread. The emanation is smaller than the physical body, but a perfect reproduction without the disfigurements of disease. As life slowly leaves the body, the thread grows slenderer, until at last it snaps free. Mr. Andersen has seen it.”

  I thought of Charley when the noose jerked the life from him. What would a clairvoyant have seen then? Watching Agnes, I wondered if she guessed my thought. I examined the others. Jeptha looked resigned; he was used to his wife’s strange opinions. Lewis was happy to hear Agnes talk like a fool. Sin
ce his arrival, he had treated her just as he used to years ago, as his absurd stuck-up cousin, and she seemed to like it. It must have been refreshing for her to find someone who did not treat her as if she were made of glass.

  Phoebe took her seat in the remaining empty chair, and I passed her the bread. The bread was good. Otherwise, the food was terrible—it was Agnes’s view that meat and spices rendered people insensitive to otherworldly messages.

  According to Mr. Andersen, we were surrounded by ghosts, who were mostly helpless witnesses to our lives, but at the end of life they acted as midwives to this second birth into the spirit world. They performed many small actions to help guide the freed spirit out of the body. For example, since they could not open doors and the new spirit could not walk through walls in a rare act of interference, they would implant the impulse to open a door into the mind of a grieving family member. The spirit of the deceased would exit by means of that door.

  “If only people could see, they wouldn’t mourn,” said Agnes, looking at Jeptha to rebuke him, for of course she wasn’t content to be humored, she wanted his active support and belief, which he could never give. “If you wept, it would be because you were the sentimental type.”

  I found these ideas interesting. I found her interesting, and I believed in her suffering and her conversion without feeling sorry for her or friendly toward her.

  When the meal was finished, we went back up to the attic, and Lewis threw himself on his mattress, saying, as if it didn’t matter very much, “So she’s good now.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Still, you can’t help wondering.”

  He obviously had more to say, but he waited for me to ask. This was something he often did, but I had never noticed it until we were stuck in the attic together with few distractions. It was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “Wonder what?” I asked finally.

  “If it’s smart for us to put our lives in her hands, seeing as she doesn’t consider death a misfortune.”

  “She’s not crazy, not that way. These things make her feel better.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they make me feel better,” I said, striking a match.

  He let the subject drop. Basically, he trusted my judgment. My story to him just before we came here was that Jeptha had contacted me through Edward—offering to help us for old times’ sake, because no one would think to look for us here. It was possible that he noticed there was something more between us. He did not ask me about it. I think he felt the topic was delicate, and wasn’t going to bring it up if I didn’t. Anyway, it was not the kind of thing we talked about.

  ONCE A DAY, JEPTHA WOULD VISIT US in the attic, either alone or accompanied by Agnes or Phoebe. He would bring the newspapers and whiskey and glasses; by some unspoken arrangement, it was always one shot for himself, one for me, and two shots for Lewis. We sat on stools and crates and read to each other about the developments in the city: there had been two more hangings; the famous prizefighter Yankee Sullivan, who had been told he was going to hang, had committed suicide in his jail cell; the Law and Order Party, which had opposed the Committee of Vigilance, had been overwhelmed and forced to surrender; hosts of men had been put in irons on ships to Hawaii and China. David Broderick, it seemed, had melted into the hills again.

  It was awkward between Lewis and Jeptha. They had not been friends when they were boys, and friendship did not come easily to them now. Neither one of them could see the point of the manner in which the other man had chosen to live. Lewis stood for the side of my life that Jeptha could never accept—for the parlor house—for a life he objected to on half a dozen different grounds. For Lewis, Jeptha was a prig, living by right and wrong instead of by friend and foe (really a perfect mate for Agnes). They tried to like each other for my sake. They traded memories of old times in Livy, choosing the most trivial topics, and people I have not bothered to mention because they have played no part in my story.

  One day not long after we had gone into hiding, Jeptha read to us a fiery oration delivered in the United States Senate by Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. Sumner was already a hero to Jeptha, and for days he quoted felicitous lines from the speech—including the famous passage in which, speaking metaphorically, Sumner says that his honorable colleague South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler keeps a mistress whose ugliness he is too besotted with love to see; and her name is Slavery.

  I could see that Lewis, though very bored and hungry for any distraction, found Jeptha’s excitement over this faraway quarrel rather bewildering.

  Since the news from the States reached California after unpredictable delays, it was not until two weeks later that we all read what had happened to Sumner only two days after he made his eloquent remarks about the senator from South Carolina. Butler’s nephew had struck Sumner in the head with a cane when he was sitting alone at his desk on the Senate floor. While he was reeling from the first blow, the Southerner had beaten him half to death, making Sumner—it was believed then—a permanent invalid. Jeptha, highly agitated after reading this, stood and walked away and walked back; I think this gave him a better understanding of how cramped our quarters were for us, because at the moment they were too cramped for him. One could see that the story spoke to the man in him and the schoolboy in him, and, like a million other Northern men, he pictured himself on the Senate floor with a cane in his hand, avenging Sumner. Lewis did not share these emotions, but at least for once they were of a kind he understood, and he watched Jeptha with an approving smile.

  HAPPY VALLEY, NOW A PART OF DOWNTOWN west of Market Street, was then a suburb of San Francisco, with houses that were surrounded by big yards, vegetable gardens, trees that had been here before ’49, and with broad meadows on the hills. Jeptha’s house was two stories tall. On the walls along the stairs were framed daguerreotypes of Jeptha’s mother and father and of Agatha and Elihu, looking much older than when I had last seen them, dressed in the finest clothes they had ever worn, and staring with the grim Calvinistic fixity of expression and shocked eyes which people in these pictures have, partly because of the long exposure times and partly because of the old-timers’ sheer astonishment that likenesses can be preserved by mechanical means. The walls throughout the house were papered in wildflower patterns, a different flower and color for each room. Casting my eyes over the fringed chairs, the lace curtains, the fading rugs, or the broken chairs and stools awaiting repair in the attic, I had a great sense of having surprised Jeptha in his home, of seeing the life he lived with his lawful wife—a life not necessarily happy but complicated and with, until now, no visible sign of me.

  It was hard for me, living there and never being alone with him: hard just to hide in an attic and not even be able to look out a window or take a walk outside. It was hard for me, and for Lewis it was impossible. Often I would wake to the steady creaking of the boards under his pacing feet. He would sit for an hour, staring through a chink in the shutters of the window, waiting for the slim section of a live-oak branch to shake with the departure or arrival of a finch; then, for variety, he would go to watch the view from a crack in the other window’s shutters; or he would stay on the stairs, just to vary his surroundings. He spent many hours honing his already impressive skills with coins and cards and his pocket knife: he whittled pine blocks into the shapes of boats and birds and fish, and one day, while I begged him not to do it, he whittled them all down into wood chips. When I woke the next morning he was gone. I crept swiftly downstairs—like some supple lizard, I had become so good at it—and sounded the alarm, and Jeptha and Agnes and Phoebe went through the house and the yard.

  I searched my bag for the list of names I had compiled based on information given to me by the three men whom I had paid to join the Committee of Vigilance:

  Jason Babcock

  William Bagley

  Richard Boggs

  Herbert Corothers

  Edgar Dent

  Andrew Gray


  Robert Gray

  Eugene Howard

  John Hubbard

  John Lyon

  Henry Teal

  These were the men who had broken into my house and raped all the females they could find, including my maids and me. At the bottom of the page were the addresses of seven of these men. I emptied my bag onto the floor, but the list was nowhere to be found. I paced the attic in sick fear, muttering, “Lewis, Lewis, you fool, you fool.”

  Jeptha and Agnes were at pains to comfort and reassure me. They did not know of my list or the true story of what had happened at my house, but they both knew what Lewis was like. They reminded me that Lewis knew he was being hunted and would continue to hide. He would know enough to stay away from San Francisco.

  Jeptha went about his usual duties, preaching sermons on Sunday and visiting members of his congregation, and seeing to the affairs of the Orphan Asylum, the Drunkard’s Mission, and the Mariner’s Hospital. A few days after Lewis left, Jeptha officiated at the funeral of a small child, and he and Agnes had an argument. She wanted to talk to the parents about the spirit world, and to tell them that they could hear the voice of their child again if their need was great and they took certain amazingly simple steps. “You don’t even believe in heaven anymore; and people can tell you don’t,” she said. “You’re torturing these people. You’re torturing them, and they don’t have to be tortured, there’s no reason for it!”

  In the attic I listened like a child spying on her parents’ quarrel. There was more, some in low voices, so that I couldn’t hear, and she said, “You can’t stop me!”

  I heard her making preparations to leave, and watched through chinks in the shutters as she walked out the door. My heart leapt when I saw that Phoebe was going with her. I watched them take a shortcut across an empty field.

  I went down to the second-floor landing. Jeptha was standing by a window, watching them go. I stood with my back to the wall, waiting until he turned toward me. I beckoned to him; I took his hand and led him to the bedroom and the spring bed and the feather mattress where each night he slept lawfully beside his wife.