Frog Music (37 page)

“Excuse me.” Outrage flares up in Blanche when she can’t get through. “Let me by.”

“Don’t push so,” cries a woman.

“I was with her,” snaps Blanche. “I was there, at San Miguel Station.”

This wins her a little elbow room. People stare, mutter, even smirk at her as if she’s some kind of star. “Blanche la Danseuse,” she hears somebody say.

She ignores all that and shoves her way to the front.

Jenny’s corpse looks infinitely strange. Partly because the short hair’s been combed back neatly—more neatly than Blanche ever saw her wear it. The dieners have made her look like … a girl. A crop-haired, weather-beaten girl, head resting on a small white pillow. Somehow pale under her dark tan:
exsanguination
, wasn’t that Crook’s word? All the blood’s been wiped away. Just a girl, swollen around the left eye with bruising showing through the paint, because somebody punched her in the face just a few hours before somebody else shot her dead.

Blanche stares, trying to fix the image in her mind like a photograph. A memento mori. The small brown hands are—not exactly joined as if praying, but clasped around a white flower. Incongruous, as if Jenny is personifying Virtuous Suffering in some tableau vivant. It’s not the pristine charity nightshirt that’s transformed her; that’s a neutral garment, one a man might wear. It’s more the fact that she’s not strutting, not swaggering, not moving at all: still.

Blanche would be better off turning away and wiping this hoax from her memory. Surely at any moment her friend’s going to let out a horse laugh and spring up, somersaulting out of the coffin, crowing,
Fooled you all!

Blanche stands and watches and holds her position despite all the others jostling to get in. There’s another burr stuck to her thoughts. Something else that was said at the inquest; what was it? The autopsy. Something about Jenny’s body.
Considerable scarring
, that was it. But Blanche never saw any scars on Jenny.
Not recent
, according to Dr. Crook. Old scars from a fall, a crash? Lord knows Jenny was accident-prone. This Adrien, did he leave his mark before he blew all her money? But no, Maria insisted that the
mac
never hit Jenny.
Considerable
, that sounds to Blanche like more than one punch, one gash. If it wasn’t this Adrien, then—

That very first night Jenny came back to number 815. Pulling Arthur’s green shirt on over her head the way men do, snapping at Blanche when she went into the bedroom:
A little privacy!
Then, even down in San Miguel Station, in the room they shared for three days, Jenny kept her clothes on. Even on Wednesday night, Blanche remembers now, pulse thumping faster. Why didn’t Blanche wonder then? Was Jenny a touch prudish, for all her blunt talk? Did she prefer to keep her femaleness out of sight, out of mind? It was just one of Jenny’s many oddities.

Blanche worms her way around to the head of the coffin, possessed by a terrible curiosity. Standing behind Jenny’s pomaded hair, she slips her hand under, where the nape is soft against the ironed pillow.

A gasp goes up from the watchers. “What do you think you’re doing?” demands a man behind her.

Blanche ignores them all and slides her fingers underneath Jenny, right down the back of the starchy nightshirt. The flesh is so chilled. She can’t feel it, what she’s looking for,
considerable scarring
. She’s going to have to see for herself.

“Hands off, miss!”

“How dare you disturb the dead?”

Somebody yanks at Blanche’s arm but she fights him off, and before she can lose her nerve she reaches across the body and grips Jenny’s shoulder, pulls hard enough to make her roll sideways. Blanche was prepared for the corpse to be stiff, but it’s not. Jenny moves languidly, that’s all, like a sleeper who’s hard to rouse. An awful smell rises above the florals.

The crowd’s in an uproar, shouting for the dieners. Hard hands on Blanche’s shoulders. She growls, throws them off. Working fast, holding Jenny with her left arm and ripping at the nightshirt with her right; a tightness, then a popping as a button flies off, and now she can see Jenny’s back, which has a strangely purple tinge to it. An awful jagged hole, and then another, but Blanche is steeled against the sight of them. There it is,
bordel!
—a ladder of pink lines from the tops of the shoulder blades all the way down as far as Blanche can see. The claw marks of some strange beast. Too many to count. Not one whipping, she reckons; long years of them. Hot pink, a whole page of angry, unfading lines.

Two dieners seize Blanche’s arms and haul her away, then hustle her up the stairs. “Could be had up for interfering with a cadaver!” scolds one of them.

Blanche sits on the curb outside the undertaker’s, her head reeling. Puts up her parasol so that no one will see her face.

She knows she’s touched what she shouldn’t have; laid bare what should have stayed hidden. Jenny was most herself with her clothes on. Sorry, Blanche is so terribly sorry. For seeing what Jenny never wanted seen. For not understanding until she saw. For not looking till now.

She curses her own slow wits. “Got into scrapes with the law from a tender age”; it was right there in Cartwright’s article. The McNamara boy even told her that Jenny had her
educating
near San Miguel Station, and what schools are there out that way? Only the brutal facade of the Industrial School, which isn’t a school at all.
Whips and gags for the troublemakers
, the boy at Marshall’s mentioned. But the inmates at the Industrial School must all be troublemakers of one sort or another, or else they wouldn’t have been sent there.
As young as three
. Skinny boys pecking at the ground with their hoes as the trains rocket by; Blanche remembers the small faces disappearing into the distance. But there used to be girls at the Industrial School too, didn’t there? Blanche should have guessed, should have heard what Jenny never said.
Some folks just like to hit kids
, Jenny remarked the evening they met, as if mentioning the weather.
I’ve seen worse
, she said another night about P’tit’s bowed legs.
I’ve seen worse
; was Jenny trying to prompt Blanche to ask her where? To shake a straight answer out of her for once?
Weals, you know, if they’ve tied them to the beds
. Jenny almost spelled it out; came within an inch of saying “they tied
me
.”

How many years did she spend in that nightmare of an institution grubbing at the earth behind the fence? The supervisor finally got fired for—what was it the woman said on the train yesterday?—
taking liberties
. Imagine how many
liberties
the man in charge can take with children before someone calls for a grand jury investigation. Blanche shudders, rocking backward and forward. What did he—what did they all—do to Jenny, to a girl who refused to be like other girls? The ladder of pink scars. And other things that don’t show up so clearly. How hard did they try to break a spirit as playful and pugnacious as Jenny’s?

The tears are spilling out of Blanche’s sockets; her head has turned to hot liquid and she’s moaning like some blinded calf. Crying not for Jenny’s death, but for Jenny’s life. For the short, lousy lives of all the children.

After some minutes Blanche wipes her face and tilts her green parasol back a little. She estimates the size of the gathering crowd; well, no fear of Jenny going lonely to the grave. Some must be gawkers, of course, but many have the swollen eyes of friends who are mourning. Real friends; old friends. For all her irksome qualities, Jenny had that gift—she could make you care about her without hardly trying. She had hundreds of friends, clearly, while Blanche had just one. For less than a month. And Blanche, reckless and ignorant, led that friend straight to the barrel of a shotgun.

She chews her lips, scanning the crowd. No tall, mustachioed Frenchman standing ready to gun her down. But it’s not as if Ernest would do it in public, anyhow. He’ll find a private moment.

Two mules stand hitched to a wagon draped in black cambric: the
corbillard. Hearse
, that’s the English word, but it’s not one Blanche has ever had reason to say. There’s a stir behind her, in the door of Gray’s, and she heaves herself upright and gets out of the way. Two men with crepe bows on their hats carry out the draped coffin as if it’s very light and place it in the hearse.
Croque-morts
, they call them back in Paris, the death crunchers.

A pair of uniformed women emerge with baskets and wreaths of lilies and carnations and arrange them on the coffin. Trying to soften the unmistakable shape, Blanche supposes.

There’s some
gamin
barely bigger than his sandwich board parading past as if he’s at a fair:
M
YSTERIOUS
M
URDER OF
F
RENCH
F
ROG
G
IRL
. A
DDITIONAL
P
ARTICULARS FROM THE
S
CENE
. “The father’s twenty minutes late already,” somebody comments behind her.

The old actor who lives in Oakland now; Blanche forgot all about him. She still can’t quite imagine Jenny with anything as ordinary as a family. Where were they, what did they do to help her when the judge sent her to the Industrial School?

The sandwich-board boy turns and Blanche reads what’s on the other side:
W
OMAN’S
M
ANIA FOR
W
EARING
M
ALE
A
TTIRE
E
NDS IN
D
EATH
. Fury, acid in her throat.

There are three carriages lined up behind the hearse. Blanche realizes she’s going to be left behind, and she doesn’t even know where the funeral is taking place. She hurries alongside and tries to look in the open windows. The third carriage is empty. In the second she recognizes a ghastly face among a bright-costumed knot of
filles de joie
. “Maria,” she makes herself cry out.

The one-eyed hag beckons Blanche in, though the carriage is a squeeze already. Maria makes the introductions, and Blanche can tell the others are titillated to meet her. She forgets their names at once and leans against the worn upholstery, shutting her eyes.

She’s picturing Jenny back when she was one of this tribe—bustle and frills, painting and primping, bringing all her earnings home for her
mac
to throw away on the table of his choice. The image sickens her; shames her, almost. It’s like a warped reflection of Blanche’s own life. No, Jenny should always have strolled loose-limbed, up- and downhill, taking the whole City for her stage.

There’s so much Blanche still doesn’t know about Jenny’s past. She opens her eyes and looks out at the milling crowd. She wonders exactly what kind of trouble with the law got Jenny locked up in the first place. Could she have been in one of those gangs of adolescent hoodlums for which San Francisco’s notorious? What kind of crowd did she run with, before the Industrial School and after?

Jenny was on the town for a while, Blanche knows that much. Moving in the sporting set, with its quick enmities and long memories. And at one point things fell apart badly enough for Jenny—despite her ebullient spirits—to decide she was better off dead. How would this Adrien have felt about Jenny walking away from him after she woke up from her overdose? Blanche wonders whether he might have nursed his resentment over the years, the way Arthur nursed his. What old debts did Jenny carry, what old scores did others want to settle with her? She was enough of a thief to swipe a priceless bicycle, after all. What other laws did she break? Could frog-hunting really have been the sole source of her cash? And why has Blanche been assuming that Arthur and Ernest were Jenny’s only enemies, that Jenny’s getting tangled up in Blanche’s complicated life was the only possible reason for her to have been killed?

These thoughts make her dizzy. It’s unbearable, the not knowing. Most of the time Blanche is sure of what happened, because she can feel Arthur’s hatred like a fire under her feet. But every now and then, the pieces fall apart in her mind and she can’t fit them back together. Two days since the murder, the
nation’s finest
detectives, newsmen
striving for justice
, a resolute coroner, and yet nobody seems any closer to the truth of how Jenny died.

“Le voilà enfin,”
exclaims Maria, “at last.”

An old man limping up the street, the crowd parting for him: this must be Sosthenes Bonnet. Well, not that old. He still has a performer’s uprightness about him, and a clever face. Not like Jenny’s, though; nothing about him is like Jenny that Blanche can see. Only his stunned stare at the hearse gives him away as the chief mourner.

Someone opens the door of the third carriage and puts the step down to help him in. It’s what’s-his-name, Portal; Blanche belatedly recognizes the lachrymose cook from Durand’s brasserie.

Now the hearse is pulling away, and all the carriages are following.

The small cortege heads down Dupont a few blocks, then turns west on Geary Boulevard. They’ve left most of the crowd behind at the undertaker’s. “Where are we going?” Blanche asks the girl beside her.

She goggles. “The cemetery, where else?”

“But which one?”

“Odd Fellows,” supplies Maria. “They’ve donated a plot.”

“Very suitable,” an older woman in bloodred rouge quips, “since Jenny was such an odd fellow!”

Maria shuts her up with a gesture.

“Oh, come,” the woman complains, “she enjoyed a laugh at her own expense …”

Blanche doesn’t want to hear any of it. Not their witticisms, nor rebuttals, nor sentimental musings on Jenny’s character … Blanche can’t bear to find out that everyone in the City knew Jenny better than she did.