Frog Music (16 page)
Authors: Emma Donoghue
She pulls away and raps the accusation out. “What I find curious is that you’re the only person who knew I was going to San Miguel Station.”
“Did I know that?”
“Do you have the gall to deny it?”
“You may very well have mentioned it last time we met.” The Prussian turns the gold ring on her finger. “Goods, clients, petty bureaucrats … you can’t imagine how much business I have to attend to in a single day.”
“But who else—how else could Arthur have found out where I was?”
Madame half smiles. “I’ve had no dealings with your
bel ami
in some months.”
“What about his friend Ernest?”
“If I haven’t seen one Siamese twin, I could hardly have seen the other.”
Madame’s a liar par excellence, but why would she need to lie in this case? Why would she even bother? It strikes Blanche with an awful clarity that Arthur wouldn’t have gone to the House of Mirrors for news of Blanche, since—much to his fury—she’d broken with Madame more than three weeks before, the moment she reclaimed P’tit from Folsom Street.
She ransacks her memories of last Tuesday, when she set off for San Miguel Station in that buggy she hired from Marshall’s. Blanche could swear she didn’t tell anyone but Madame her destination. But of course—her stomach sinks—Jenny could have mentioned it to any number of people. Those unknown friends whose sofas she used to nap on. Jenny knew the strangest assortment of folks.
But Blanche presses on: “The detectives won’t believe Arthur’s involved, not unless I can show he knew where Jenny and I were last night.”
“Ah,” says Madame, letting the syllable out with a soft hiss. “Now I understand the purpose of this unexpected visit. You’re asking me to swear that your discarded
mac
burst in here yesterday waving a gun, mustache dripping with foam, and that I, out of pique because you’d disrupted my schedule of performances, sent him off hotfoot to shoot up San Miguel Station?”
Blanche chews her lip. Put that way, it sounds like a third-rate melodrama.
“It’s not that I have any objection in principle to misleading the authorities—especially these days,” adds Madame, “since the board of supervisors seems to have embarked on the doomed venture of trying to whitewash a city that’s been a byword for liberty. No, the problem is that my involving myself would draw the attention of the police to my business. And incidentally, the fable you propose would leave me open to an accusation of abetting—even inciting—a murder.” She winds up with a little nunnish smile.
Salope:
the word is salty as blood in Blanche’s mouth, and it would be some relief to say it.
“As it happens,” says Madame, “the only man who’s been here inquiring after you is Signor Lamantia. He’s sent to me twice in recent weeks, offering considerable sums just to know where you might be.”
Blanche rolls her eyes. L’amant de Blanche; her Sicilian regular is just a buzzing fly.
“You really mustn’t hide away,” murmurs Madame. “The City’s memory is so short. Unless you’re planning to live on your rents, without dancing or
michetons
?”
It’s living through the next few days that worries Blanche. “Just pay me my hundred dollars and I won’t trouble you any further.”
“Ah, still you misunderstand. Let me show you the figures, to make the matter crystal clear.” Madame opens her ledger and slides it over. “Two show fees of fifty dollars each in the left-hand column. And on the right, your outstanding debits: costumes, musical accompaniment, refreshments, dressing, rehearsal and stage facilities furnished, advertisements circulated …”
“Hogwash,” Blanche cries. “You can’t work these madam’s cheats on me. You take your finder’s fee whenever you arrange a rendezvous, and it’s never been part of our bargain that I pay for costumes or music. I ain’t one of your stable. I’m an independent artiste, and the most popular ever seen at your house.”
“Nor has it ever been part of our bargain that you can quit on me with no notice, leaving me with no explanation to offer your many admirers,” says Madame coolly.
“What
refreshments,”
Blanche demands, “the odd glass of brandy?”
“Everything costs, my dear. Since you decided to forgo my protection so abruptly last month—”
Protection?
A muscle in Blanche’s cheek twitches as she reckons the fortune this woman must have made off her hide.
“—well, I must recoup some of my losses by charging for what it’s cost me to turn you into Blanche la Danseuse.”
“To turn me into—” says Blanche, bewildered.
“You were a pregnant bareback rider,” says Madame, “with very little to make you stand out from the tide of female flesh that washes into this City. You were raw material, from which, I congratulate myself, I constructed a figure of considerable mystique.”
Blanche is speechless.
“Three hundred seventeen dollars, all told,” Madame adds more briskly, pointing to the figure on the right, “which, reduced by your earnings of one hundred, comes to two seventeen. Will you be paying in notes or coin?”
Blanche grabs the ledger and pokes the column on the left. “What about adding this: ‘Payment to Blanche Beunon in consideration of her not telling the police about the goddamn dying babies’?”
Madame looks as if Blanche has soiled her chair. And then her face changes—lights up. “Despite all the abuse you’re heaping on my head in your pardonable state of distress after the shock of your friend’s death, I would like to help you, for old times’ sake. May I suggest you let me announce one final Saturday appearance of the Lively Flea, tomorrow night?”
Blanche almost laughs. This woman is made of India rubber. “You must be joking.”
“For an unprecedented fee—say, five, no, ten times your usual. Five hundred dollars,” Madame almost sings, marveling at her own kindness. “Which would clear what you owe me and leave you with almost three hundred to be getting on with.”
Blanche swallows hard.
The Prussian’s fiddling with her wedding ring, not just waiting for an answer but enjoying seeing Blanche squirm. Letting them both hear the silence that implies consent. “Until tomorrow, then?”
Almost three hundred dollars. Blanche doesn’t open her mouth in case what comes out is
You cold bitch, I’ll never work for you again
. She has so little cash in hand, she can’t afford to give an unequivocal no. So she says nothing at all, just grabs her bag and makes for the door.
Almost cantering away from the House of Mirrors in her little mules, sweat breaking out on her forehead and under her arms. Forget the money for now. Blanche has to get off Sacramento Street before she walks right into Arthur or Ernest or one of their set. She ducks down the next passage, skirts a spill of cabbage leaves, and almost trips over an elderly man in the shadows. Only one sleeve on his shirt. An
R
burned on his dark gray cheek. He’s singing nasally:
Here in this country so dark and dreary
,
I long have wandered forlorn and weary
.
His cap’s on the ground in front of him, but there’s nothing in it. His eyes are squeezed tight shut. Perhaps there were coins but some
gamin
snatched them already? There’s someone like this every five paces in the City, metropolis of bums of all shades. Blanche supposes San Francisco is where they wind up because of the mild winters; they figure at least they won’t freeze solid overnight. Jenny would have stopped and given him fifty cents for a bunk. Jenny would have learned the rest of his song, his story.
I just like stories
, she said, that first night at Durand’s. Blanche can’t afford to throw anything in his cap, she decides, and it’d only get stolen anyway.
“‘Do not detain me,’” he drones on sorrowfully,
For I am going
To where the fountains are ever flowing
.
There’s the city to which I journey
,
My redeemer, my redeemer is its light!
There’s the city
. Oh; heaven is what he means, not San Francisco. Blanche speeds past the busker, away down the alley.
That August morning, the day after she’s brought P’tit back from Folsom Street—
rescued
him, as Blanche thinks of it, so she’ll feel valiant rather than simply miserable—her face in the great mantelpiece mirror looks a whole year older. Shoulders hard as boards. She used to do handstands on horseback, she reminds herself; carrying a baby around shouldn’t be too much for her. She’s feeling feeble only because she’s barely slept. P’tit’s seal bark got worse in the night, or perhaps it just seemed to because the tin sides of the trunk made it echo. (Arthur gave up at two o’clock and decamped to the sofa.) Clearly this is going to be as much work for Blanche as giving birth to the creature all over again.
“Light housework,” Gudrun repeats like a protective incantation, tying on her apron.
“But this would be
instead
of housework—as I said, never mind the dishes if you’ll just take him out for an hour or two so I can have a nap,” pleads Blanche.
The Swede’s golden head shakes firmly. “I told yesterday, no experience.”
“You’ll soon get the hang of it.”
“I don’t want,” says Gudrun.
“What about wages on top of your board?” offers Blanche. “What do you make for sewing shirts?”
Still shaking her head. “I prefer factory.”
“Whatever you’re earning, we can pay you more,” says Blanche, too shrill.
“I never be a live-in.”
“No, no, you’ll still sleep in your attic. It’s only day nursing I’m talking—”
“I prefer factory.”
Blanche gnaws her lip and carries P’tit into the bedroom without another word. She examines his puny armpits. At least all the patient sponging with ice water has cleared up the rash. She’s going to stay in here until the young woman’s finished the dishes and tidied up, because if Blanche starts a fight and Gudrun walks out, there’ll be no one even to carry the chamber pots down to the drain in the hall.
The long Monday drags by. All P’tit seems fond of is his wretched doorknob. But he’ll accept other things if Blanche puts them to his rash-rimmed mouth: bottles of milk, meat broth, bread pap out of a duck-shaped feeding boat. And of course his sugar tit, the little cloth bag of honeycomb (recommended by an American grocer) that she’s tied to his sheet. P’tit lies there in his padded trunk, mouthing the sweetness. His spatulate limbs swim in a spasmodic way that Blanche finds not at all human.
He sicks half his meals up, but Blanche grits her teeth and reminds herself that that must be because his stomach isn’t used to ample feeding or because something’s gone down the wrong way, making him cough till he convulses. His diapers overflow with brown liquid, and the stinking pile is rising. No one’s hauled it to the laundry above Hop Yik’s because Blanche forgot to ask Gudrun before the girl marched off to the shirt factory.
Arthur knows that Blanche has answered a note from Madame—but not that she did so by sending it back torn to pieces. He’s of the view that Madame Johanna’s so busy running the House of Mirrors, she’s probably never been to see how Doctress Hoffman looks after all those babies, and besides, it’s pointless to bear a grudge when there’s no real harm done,
hein
?
Blanche stares at P’tit. Harm has been done. She’s convinced that Madame knew exactly what she was doing when she sent P’tit to Folsom Street at barely a month old. What was the plan, for him to snuff it, natural-like, and be no further trouble to the Lively Flea? It’s astonishing that P’tit has survived his first year on earth. No wonder he’s … well, damaged goods. “Though doing well, considering,” Blanche says out loud, with hollow cheer.
For answer, P’tit farts, sailor-style, and braces his swollen stomach with a look that—she’s already learned to recognize—signals a violent squirting. “Don’t leak on the sofa,” she pleads, rushing to pick him up in time.
He can see her, at least. Blanche is sure of that much now. His hearing, she’s not so certain about. The tiny hollows of his ears seem gummed up with wax, but when she tried to dig it out with the tiny spoon from the salt dish this morning, he started wheezing with distress. Her guess is that he can hear but he’s doing his best to ignore her. When Blanche roars at him, he startles and cries, and she feels awful. He’s come to tolerate her carrying him about the apartment—in fact, seems to rather prefer it to being left in his trunk—but can’t bear anything in the nature of a caress. The few times his father’s picked him up, P’tit’s puked on his cravat or all over the ring—black onyx set in gold, with a scarab motif—that Blanche bought Arthur the first time she earned a hundred dollars in a single night.
She passes the hours yawning and wondering what—if anything—is going on behind that bulging forehead. P’tit’s face remains closed, except when it pinches up in agitation. He hasn’t had much to smile about, she supposes. But the bad times are over, doesn’t he realize that? Or at least the worst times. He’s home now, with Maman, in the best apartment in the building. He could make some effort …
She does know how absurd that sounds.
By evening, the heat of the day has thickened like a smell. P’tit finally falls into a snuffling doze in her locked arms.
A tap at the door. Has Arthur gotten so cockeyed he’s dropped his keys somewhere? Blanche hoists the sleeping child and walks over to open it.
Jenny Bonnet, the pool of purple around her eye faded to greenish yellow, the swelling gone down. It was only two days ago when the thug walloped her chez Durand, Blanche calculates. That was in Blanche’s old life, before she brought P’tit home.
Jenny’s loose suit is flecked with mud, and there’s a sack over her shoulder. “Hi,” she says, with a grin. “Hungry?”