Frog Music (46 page)

He says it so low that Blanche strains to hear: “It was because you’re the goddamn mother.”

It comes again, that muffled little sound. Ernest’s head whips around and he’s moving to shut the door but Blanche has got him by the sleeve.

The door bangs on her arm, forcing a long scream out of her. But she doesn’t let go, she won’t let go, she’ll never let go because she knows whose small wordless voice she’s hearing. “P’tit! P’tit!”

“Crazy
salope—
”

When Ernest opens the door enough to kick her away, Blanche thrusts her whole self through. He grabs her by the skirt and she pulls away hard enough that it rips at the waist. She’s in the apartment and here’s P’tit, wearing only a diaper—

And walking. Can this really be P’tit?

Still stubby at wrist and ankle, thick-foreheaded, but less so, somehow. His skin clearer. His eyebrows almost elegant. Up on his own two feet. P’tit, her P’tit, though he shows no sign of recognizing Blanche. He pats the wallpaper, sways like a drunk.

The blonde is behind him, in only a limp chemise and petticoat, her hair tangled. Looking her age, for the first time. “Blanche,” says Madeleine, her mouth trembling so she can hardly form the syllable. She reaches down for P’tit’s little shoulders.

“Hands off,” howls Blanche.

“I only—”

“Hands off my baby!”

And then Ernest does the strangest thing. Drops to his knees, puts his lips to the child’s round skull. “Turning into the spit of your father, aren’t you, P’tit Arthur?” he says, very gently.

“Just P’tit,” Blanche corrects him under her breath.

She should have recognized that milky stain on Ernest’s lapel. The man has a knack with the boy, she realizes. Now, there’s a joke. A natural father. When was it, over the past two weeks of harboring Arthur’s child, that Ernest began to fall in love with him? For his absent friend’s sake, at first, but it’s well beyond that now, Blanche can see. His arm hovers in a half circle behind the boy, just in case he wobbles. The tenderness.

P’tit Arthur Girard, not Deneve, that’s who P’tit could grow up to be if Blanche left him here. Because a killer might make a good parent, after all, a much better parent than the woman who pushed the baby into the world in the first place. Blanche briefly considers the gracious mothering Madeleine would give P’tit. How Ernest would shield him in a way Arthur never managed. And P’tit, well, she supposes he wouldn’t remember anything else.

No
.

“He’s the price,” she growls at Ernest. “I take him now, this minute. Or I’m going straight to Bohen with what I know, and they’ll keep after you till they prove the rest, and you’ll be on a gallows by Christmas.”

At first Blanche has no idea if her improvisation’s going to work. Ernest’s face is a wooden mask.

Madeleine’s tired, delicate features contort as she looks from the man to the child. The woman will do anything to save one of them, thinks Blanche, if she can only decide which one.

Blanche runs to scoop P’tit up. He wails and flails, but she’s ready for that. She’s out on the landing and thundering down the stairs, pressing her boy to her. She feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that’s mixed with piss and can’t be separated from it.

Thursday evening, the fourteenth of September, Blanche goes back out to the saloon.

John Jr., who’s been reading a book by bad light at the bar, stares up at her.

In an undertone, she asks his mother for some ice.

“What for?” says Ellen.

The whole family must have heard the women’s quarrel just now, and Blanche punching Jenny in the face. The Irishwoman’s just trying to humiliate her by asking. “Jenny got a black eye earlier, riding,” Blanche lies blankly.

A sniff. “Dangerous business, riding.”

“So do you have a bit of ice?”

“I do not, so. The last cold thing in San Miguel melted a month ago.”

“A fresh steak, then?”

“Would you be having
pommes frites
with that, miss?” A dry laugh. “Where do you think you are?”

This isn’t a cathouse
, that might be what Ellen’s hinting.
Take your filthiness elsewhere
.

Blanche keeps her mouth shut. She returns to the bedroom and shuts the door behind her.

Jenny’s flat on her back on the bed.

“You more than half deserved it,” says Blanche, but all the fight’s gone out of her.

“Take that as an apology, shall I?”

“I thought apologies weren’t worth the candle,” she says, risking quoting Jenny’s line back at her.

“Yours aren’t, that’s for sure.”

The flesh all around Jenny’s eyes is puffy when she sits up. It’ll be black and blue by morning, Blanche reckons.

Sorry
. Blanche is so sorry, for the blow and for everything else, for all she’s dragged Jenny into this summer—but she can’t say the word.

“Guess the frogs will have to play Scheherazade,” Jenny remarks.

Blanche stares at her. “This is one of those moments when I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“They’re reprieved for one more night,” explains Jenny.

“Ah.”

“Though, does it count, I ask myself, if they’re living in a dark sack?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” says Blanche.

“Well, as the fellow says, never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till the day after …”

Blanche is not sure which of them lets out the first yawn, but there seems no reason to stay up any later.

Jenny sheds her layers and shakes the dust out of them. In McNamara’s long nightshirt, she wrestles with the window shade, then calls their host in to take a look at it, and bring them a drop of cognac while he’s at it.

Mary Jane comes in with the glasses while her father’s tinkering with the blind and stays lolling on the bed after he’s gone.

“What do you mean to make of yourself, Mary Jane?” Blanche wants to know.

Her eyes narrow. “When I get out of here?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. All I think about is the getting out.”

The distant whistle of a passing train.

Jenny opens her tobacco pouch. “Twenty-minute ride,” she says, nodding north, “you could be a whole different person.”

“What happened to your face?” Mary Jane asks in a way that shows she knows already.

“Qu’importe,”
says Jenny with a grin.

“Is that French for something?”

“Yeah, French for ‘mind your own damn business,’” says Blanche.

The girl flounces out to the saloon.

Jenny watches Blanche over the pipe she’s filling.

“Take that stinky thing outside, would you?”

“It keeps off the skeeters,” says Jenny, but she steps out on the porch with her pipe and matchbox.

Blanche can hear Mary Jane in the back room talking to her mother. Jenny, just outside the window, gives the dog a good scratch and talks to him in a pretend-fierce voice. The candle flame’s straight and steady; there’s not a hint of breeze to stir the heavy air. Blanche remembers the night they met. How she sang a snatch of “Au Clair de la Lune” as they climbed up the dark stairwell.
“‘Ma chandelle est morte,’”
she croons now,
“‘Je n’ai plus de feu.’”
My candle’s dead and I’ve no more fire.

From just outside the window, the familiar refrain, in Jenny’s lighter, melodic voice:

Ouvre-moi ta porte
,

Pour l’amour de Dieu
.

Open up to me, for God’s sake.

Blanche would prefer to leave the window up an inch or two but the bugs are starting to whine their way in, drawn to the candle. She struggles with the frame and lowers it with a thud. Her hand brushes against the green baize and it droops on one side, goddamn it. Nails come out of these chalky walls as easily as teeth out of an old skull. Blanche peers out through the narrow gap and sees Jenny wrestling with the dog in the moonlight, everything weirdly silver.

Nearly a month since Jenny crashed into Blanche’s life and—it could be said—Blanche crashed into hers.
If you meet an obstacle you can jump free
, Jenny boasted. But not always. You have to allow for some damage.

Jenny comes in then, sets her empty pipe on the bureau, and jumps into bed.

“Moon’s up,” says Blanche, yawning.

“Everyone’s a moon, as the fellow says.”

“Huh?”

“With a side nobody sees,” adds Jenny. She’s leaning back on her elbows, her swollen face turned toward Blanche. Who, undoing her chemise, feels the familiar sensation of eyes on her. Something could happen or not, it could go either way, and who’s to say it much matters? Maybe the two of them came closest to each other yesterday evening. Or even tonight, at the moment when Blanche punched Jenny in the face. Maybe they’ve started to diverge again, drifting apart, two twigs in a stream.

On the edge of the bed, Blanche stoops to unlace her borrowed gaiters. A train hurtles north, close enough to shake the Eight Mile House. She bends to undo her second gaiter, ripping at the laces. Tries an old Picard air under her breath, though why is she singing a lullaby when there’s no baby to hear it?

Dors, min p’tit quinquin
,

Min p’tit pouchin
,

Min gros rojin …

Sleep, my little child, my little chick, my fat grape. The laces are snagged. Blanche hauls up her mauve skirt and sets her right ankle on her left knee, the canvas printing her skin with grit. The gaiter clings to her round calf like some old skin that won’t be sloughed. Mud flecking the floorboards, the dingy sheets … this whole four-room shack is probably crawling with fleas and lice, but somehow Blanche doesn’t care. Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.

Blanche plucks at the gaiter with her longest nail. One second and she’ll have it undone.

Dors, min p’tit quinquin
,

Min p’tit pouchin—

That’s Jenny joining in, her voice clean as a bird’s, her eyes wide open. “And the rest, how does it go?”

“Like this.” Blanche bends right over to wrestle with the lace, her lungs filling, stretching rib cage, muscles, seal-plump skin, corset, dress, as she sings a mother’s warning to a baby who just won’t sleep:

Te m’fras du chagrin

Si te n’dors—

The cracks come so hard Blanche thinks they’re thunder. The candle’s out.

A sulfurous tang in the dark, less like a thunderstorm than fireworks, but who could be setting off fireworks? What is there to celebrate on the fourteenth of September? Outside, the dogs of San Miguel Station bark in furious chorus.

“Qu’est-ce—”
Is that what Jenny says, or just a gasp, a hiss?

And Blanche says, “Wait.”

“Let’s count our silver,” she says to P’tit now in the quietest private compartment, the one at the swaying end of the slow Sunday train heading inland to Sacramento. “There’s a dollar. See Lady Liberty? And this one’s an Indian head.” Never too early for a child to learn his coinage. “Here’s a half eagle. Have a chew on that, but don’t swallow it …”

Blanche has the impression P’tit appreciates hearing her talk, or hearing talk of any kind. One of these days, she supposes, the child will begin to figure out what she’s saying. He sits stiffly, looking absurdly small against the adult-size seat. His movements aren’t random spasms anymore. It’s as if he’s conducting an unseen orchestra. His gaze seems more ambitious as he mouths the dollar. She wonders if P’tit even remembers his doorknob, the one Blanche lost to the drunken rioters. What does it mean to miss something you can’t hold in your memory? Children learn to do without the things they used to weep for. They move on, as everyone has to.

What a fraud Blanche has felt, ever since she picked him up and ran down Madeleine’s stairs this afternoon. Like a woman who’s stolen a baby.

But no looking back. No giving a rat’s ass about bygones. Blanche doesn’t intend to pronounce the name of Arthur Deneve ever again. She suited him very well for his salad days—his years in the circus, and even after the fall that ended them. She was a witty, tipsy companion who earned her own money, asked little of him, and never said no. Who made just one mistake—called P’tit—but then kept that mistake out of his sight for the best part of a year. Yes, Blanche can see now that she was never the girl Arthur would end up marrying. And though she has regrets, that’s not one of them. Good luck to this French bride of his, who can have no idea what she’s taking on. “It turns out he didn’t care enough about me to order my murder,” she remarks to P’tit.

The child glances her way.

“At least you don’t have killer’s blood in you, that’s something.” Blanche gives him her biggest grin.

His mouth twitches.

A smile. A goddamn smile! Gone as quick as a mouse, but still.

She feels the glow for a long minute before she remembers that it was probably Madeleine who taught P’tit to smile, a week ago. Madeleine who saw him take a first step, with fawn-shaky legs. Blanche missed it. One way or another, she’s missed most things. Well, too bad. P’tit will just have to forget Madeleine, and Ernest, and number 815, and the farm on Folsom Street; everything that came before. Blanche will make him believe he’s always lived in the city of Sacramento. She means to lock the past up in her heart and never let this boy guess he was ever anything other than treasured.

Blanche rubs her bruised arm and stares out the window at the baked land. They’ll see something of America at last. Ninety miles of it, at least. Why Sacramento, of all destinations? Perhaps simply because Jenny told her about it: booming, growing upward as well as out, almost literally pulling itself out of the mud. There should be room for enterprising newcomers there. Room for Blanche and P’tit. Or perhaps it’s simply because Blanche has spent a year and a half living on Sacramento Street, which gestures toward—and is named for—that upstart city. It seems like some kind of sign, and she doesn’t have any other to follow.