Frog Music (3 page)

A mournful face looks through the hatch from the kitchen, and Durand snaps at him, “Ease up on the salt, Jeanne says.”

This must be Portal. The cook makes a small, obscene gesture in Jenny’s direction.

“You know I’m right,
mon vieux
,” she tells Portal.

“Stick to swamp-wading.” He mops his forehead with his sleeve and disappears again.

“So come on now,” says Jenny to Blanche, greedily, “who are you and what’s your story?”

“Hold on. Swamp-wading?” Blanche repeats.

“I caught these last night, out by Lake Merced,” Jenny tells her, holding up a glistening bone.

“That’s your trade? Hunting frogs?” Well, it would go some way to explain the young woman’s getup. “Don’t they give you warts?”

“That’s pure dumb superstition.” Jenny offers her small hands for examination.

They’re brown but smooth. “Couldn’t you work at something … I don’t know, less disgusting?”

“Guess I don’t disgust easy,” says Jenny. “The City has three hundred restaurants, and all the French and Chinese ones need frogs.”

“But they’re such ugly, clumsy creatures.”

“Clumsy? You ever seen them swim?”

Now that she thinks about it, Blanche realizes she’s never seen a live frog except on sale in barrels on Dupont Street. “But the smell, the slime—”

“That’s fish you’re thinking of. Frogs don’t smell of anything,” Jenny corrects her, “and without a touch of slipperiness, you can’t have it both ways.”

“Both ways?”

“Live on land and in water as well. I call that crafty.”

Blanche purses her mouth. “That’s my glass you’re drinking from, by the way.”

Jenny blinks at it. “Sorry.” She gestures to Durand for another.

“An apology at last,” marvels Blanche under her breath, satirical.

When the proprietor slaps a clean glass down in front of her, she refills it and strips the last shred of garlicky meat from a delicate bone with her teeth. “Since you’ve drunk from my glass,” she tells Jenny, “you should be able to read my thoughts. Except you’d probably call that more
dumb superstition
.”

Jenny furrows her brow. “Your name is Patience Vautrien … and you’re a dairymaid.”

Blanche makes a small sound of outrage. Those girls are known for their reek. “I did once work with horses,” she says. A fact, if a misleading one.

“But not anymore?” Jenny presses her temples, frowning with effort. “Mrs. Hector Losange, mother of five lovely offspring, known for her charity teas?” She waits. “Arabella Delafrance, lady spy?”

“Enough!” The joke suddenly sours on Blanche. As if it’s not as clear as day from her flowered bodice, fuchsia skirt, and general gaudiness that she’s a showgirl, at least, and probably on the town.

Why should she care who knows? If Blanche didn’t want to be recognized for what she was, she wouldn’t dress this way, would she? She never exactly intended to be a soiled dove (that curious euphemism), but neither can she remember putting up any real objection. She stepped into the life like a swimmer entering a lake, a few inches at a time.

“So where did you grow up,” she asks, to change the subject, “America’s belly or mouth?”

“Some gristly part, anyway,” Jenny jokes instead of answering.

“How much?” asks a man at Blanche’s shoulder.

She decides to assume he’s addressing Durand. “Have you family?” she presses on.

“Found under a cabbage leaf, I was,” says Jenny, deadpan.

“I said, how much?” The American is breathing right in Blanche’s ear, and she can smell the chaw in his mouth.

“I’m eating,” she says without looking around.

“Only asking a civil question.” The big man squeezes up to the bar between the two women, dark wheels of sweat under his arms.

“You’re bothering the lady,” mentions Jenny.

He turns to look her up and down. “You reckon I can’t afford her?” Jingling coins in his pocket. “Because for your information, I could hire six of this slut”—jerking his thumb at Blanche—“with change to spare.”

“As the fellow says,” Jenny remarks, “better keep your mouth shut and seem stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”

The last thing Blanche wants is a quarrel. Across his bulk, she frowns furiously at Jenny.

“You calling me stupid?” asks the fellow after a second’s delay, reddening as he shifts his quid of tobacco to the other cheek.

“A leather-headed lunk of the highest order,” says Jenny pleasantly.

He presents his fist for inspection, inches from her face. “Somebody ought to teach you to keep your nose out of other folks’ business, girlie.”

“My friend Mr. Colt here would not concur.” Jenny slides her jacket aside to show a tapering shape in her trouser leg.

Blanche is off her stool and an arm’s length away, butter dripping. Absurdly, she wishes she’d picked up her napkin to wipe her mouth.

“Oh,” growls the American, “you’ve got nothing on you that impresses me, you, you puny—goddamn morphodite!”

Durand has finally noticed what’s brewing.
“Dehors,”
he roars, pointing toward the door.

Jenny hops down from the stool, a Harlequin in a pantomime.

The American follows obediently, but when Jenny holds the door for him with flip courtesy, he backhands her into the wall. The crack of the young woman’s skull against a faded print of the Champs-Elysées makes even the most dogged drinkers glance up.

“Monsieur Durand!” protests Blanche.

But the owner only raises his eyes to heaven.

Jenny, with the look of a stunned calf, bends to retrieve her hat. The print falls to the floor with a tinkle of glass. And now the
connard
has her wrist behind her back and he’s marching her out, using her shoulder to shove the door open.

Blanche races out after them, yanks at his arm: “Have you no shame, whaling on a female like some brute?”

The American flicks her against the wall.

Struggling for breath, clutching her side, Blanche curses her size. At times like this she feels like some fairy in a world of trolls.

The man has dropped Jenny on the sidewalk. Is he going to stave her ribs in, stamp on her head?

Blanche lets out a wail.

No, he just lands a squirt of brown juice on Jenny and slouches off down the street. Without a second glance at Blanche, she notices—which tells her it was a row more than a woman that he was itching for all along.

She leans on the windowsill of the brasserie, dizzy. The leg bruised by the bicycle wobbles under her, and her ribs throb. Nothing’s broken, though. Blanche has enough experience to know that.

Kearny Street is humming around them, burners and reflectors multiplying the light of oil lamps in every storefront. Drinkers shuffle arm in arm from bar to bar, bawling dirty choruses. Knots of men head for the
bordels
on Commercial or Pacific to sample Jewesses, Mexicans, black girls, Orientals (though they’ll still pay highest for French, Blanche thinks with a certain satisfaction). A river of faces, festively red-eyed, as if they’ve given up even trying to sleep till the heat breaks. Smallpox be damned, nobody’s staying in tonight.

Jenny sits up and lifts her sharp chin with an attempt at a grin. Her face is swelling already: a dark-edged cut below the left eyebrow. She turns aside and pukes her supper neatly into the gutter.

How the evening’s complicated itself. Blanche should just walk away, right now, from this gun-packing jester who’s caused her damage twice in as many hours. Life in the City by the Bay is demanding enough without the company of someone who runs toward risk like a child to bonbons.

But she lets out a long breath. The fact is, Blanche hasn’t had so much fun with a stranger since—well, since leaving France, and farther back than that. Their little circle in San Francisco is—as it was in Paris—composed of Blanche, Arthur, Ernest, and whoever the two men bring home. Blanche can’t think of another acquaintance she’s formed as fast (and on her own) as tonight’s with Jenny Bonnet. Such a strange sense of familiarity and ease along with the novelty. “You should slap a bit of meat on that eye,” she advises.

A derisory grunt from Jenny.

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

What a one for secrets this young woman is. “Come on, let’s get you home,” says Blanche, holding out her hand.

“Fact is,” says Jenny, clambering to her feet, “I’m only out a week.”

Out
? Out of … ah, doesn’t that just take the cake: a jailbird. “What were you in for?”

“Oh, the usual. ‘Appearing in the apparel of the other sex,’” quotes Jenny in a pompous voice.

Blanche frowns. Can that be an actual crime? “Well, if this outfit gets you arrested,” she asks with a hint of impatience, “what makes you keep putting it back on?”

“It suits me,” says Jenny.

So deadpan that Blanche doesn’t register the pun until a second later. This young woman’s spirits sure revive fast. “You must be lodging somewhere,” Blanche persists.

“Been high-wheeling, mostly,” says Jenny.

Zooming along on that contraption, day and night? “What, you sleep on the wing like some seabird?”

“I take naps in parks or theaters, or on a friend’s sofa when I feel the need,” Jenny concedes.

There’s blood trickling onto the woman’s collar, Blanche notices now, and a trace of vomit on her chin. Blanche lets out a small groan. After all, it was for her sake, out of some kind of misguided gallantry, that this curious female got herself beat up. “Come on. I’m just a step away, on Sacramento Street.”

“Lady, what makes you think you have to—”

“Come if you’re coming,” she snaps.

The Durand boy, perched astride the great spokes of the bicycle’s front wheel, is taking in the whole scene as comfy as if he’s in the stalls at the Bella Union Theater. Jenny flicks him a small coin and leads the machine off by the handlebars down Kearny Street.

She suddenly cuts sideways, nearly knocking Blanche down again, and rattles her machine across the cobbles. She halts below a window from which a song is drifting in a scratchy voice.

’Tis you who makes my friends my foes
,

’Tis you who makes me wear old clothes
.

Jenny leans against the wall, her face alight as she listens to the unseen man.

He sings, “‘Here you are so near my nose—’”

“‘Tip her up,’” Jenny carols in an oddly sweet soprano, “‘and down she goes.’”

From inside the building, laughter, and several voices roar the chorus back at her.

Ha, ha, ha, you and me
,

“Little brown jug,” don’t I love thee!

Ha, ha, ha …

Blanche turns away with a sudden yawn. She crosses at the flagstone strip on the corner.

“‘The rose is red,’” Jenny belts out, gliding after her, standing straight-legged on the mounting peg of her machine.

My nose is, too
,

The violet’s blue, and so are you
;

And yet I guess before I stop
,

We’d better take another drop
.

Blanche leads the way west on Clay into Chinatown proper, where the streets are sinking into the patchy blackness of their accustomed night. The moon’s waning C has got caught in one of those alleys so skinny that the overhanging balconies almost touch. When Blanche and Arthur came to the City, they naturally washed up in Chinatown, where the rents were low and patrolmen hardly ever penetrated the warren of passageways. Few of the businesses here can afford to hire Specials to guard the streets, so folks live more or less as they like. Passing her favorite noodle house now, Blanche breathes in hot oil, ginger, and sesame. Then rotten vegetables, from the next alley. This quarter’s always filthy—mostly because the City supervisors won’t fix its sewers or pay for garbage collection. Arthur relishes it, claiming that skirting piles of fishtails makes him feel like a true bohemian. The newsmen call Chinatown a laboratory of infection; if even half what they say were true, Blanche thinks irreverently, she and Arthur and all its other residents would be dead by now.

Dupont Street is littered with yellow flags that shopkeepers must have ripped off their doors so they could get back to business. “I hope you’ve had your scratch?” she asks Jenny, suddenly wary.

Jenny slaps her sleeve above the elbow. “Stood in line for a day, eight years back, when it hit the City last.”

“I thought perhaps you’d take your chances,” Blanche teases, “being so devil-may-care.”

Jenny grins back. “Devil-may-care’s not the same as dumb as an ox.”

In the middle of the street, a spectral man in silk pants and bonnet is stooping to collect the little flags. Chinatown’s a soup of these pigtailed bachelors—more and more of them stirred into the mix every month. Low Long, Blanche’s lodger, tells her that’s because no one will rent to Orientals elsewhere in the City.

“What do you want with those?” Jenny calls out to the man.

He blinks, doesn’t have enough English to answer her.

Blanche laughs under her breath. “Word’s going round this week that the flags aren’t the mark of the disease, but the opposite—they scare it away.”

Jenny shakes her head in wonder. “Like some old girls I met in jail, quite convinced by the scaremongers that vaccinations give you syph!”

Looking into an alley, Blanche glimpses knots of people bedding down on skinny balconies, flat roofs, even stoops—anywhere that might offer a breath of air in the suffocating night. At the corner of Sacramento Street, she and Jenny pass a metal drum full of smoldering blankets and rugs. A rubber-masked man is hammering a wet sheet over the door of a building that has steam pouring out all its windows. Another white official is herding a dozen Chinese men with waist-length braided pigtails into a wagon stenciled
Board of Health
.