Frog Music (7 page)

“Do you bring protection yourselves, gentlemen?”

Arthur smiles. “Americans are so gun-crazy. A knife’s more reliable and won’t spoil the line of a suit.”

Blanche couldn’t swear to whether her lover’s ever used it, the stiletto he’s carried as long as she’s known him. She can imagine it, though. Arthur stays good-humored longer than most men, but when he finally loses his temper, it’s not a pretty sight. A couple of times over the years, he and Ernest have made vague references to having to persuade a fellow of something, or teach him a lesson … But Blanche doesn’t ask. She does her leg shows and meets her
michetons
, and the men lay their wagers and run their schemes.

Ernest’s asking Jenny what she lives on. “Frog-catcher—is that slang for something dirty?” he wonders hopefully.

“It’s what it says.”

“What a deliciously bizarre trade,” says Arthur.

“These free spirits despise all trades,” Blanche warns Jenny. “Arthur claims the only truly honest way to make a buck is by chance, whether at the gaming table or the Exchange.”

Her lover grins. “There is a certain grace to speculation.”

“Blanche is just not naturally indolent enough to be a true bohemian like us.” Ernest sighs. “Nose to the grindstone, night after night …”

His graphic mime of her giving some
micheton
a below-job makes Arthur burst out laughing.

Blanche feels irritation grip her temples like the claws of a bird. It’s true, and it’s no secret, so why should she mind? It’s just that Ernest’s bobbing head is like a distorted reflection of herself in some filthy pool.

Jenny’s eyes are on her, watchful.

Blanche makes herself giggle too. “Just as well I work so hard, or there are times we might have starved.”

That came out wrong: not witty but biting.

Arthur’s smile has faded at the edges. Then he leans back languidly as if posing for an artist. “Starving’s terribly bohemian.”

He’s saved the moment, Blanche thinks with a rush of relief.

Ernest puts in a caveat: “So long as we’ve always got a bottle and a cigar!”

Without anyone noticing, the apartment seems to have filled with light. Blanche squints at the windows: another
satané
sunny day.

Hoisting herself to her feet, Jenny begins her round of thanks.

“Is that your blood or the cow’s?” Arthur wants to know.

Yawning, as she buttons her jacket over her shirtfront: “A splash of each. The puke’s definitely mine.”

“You can’t go out there looking like that,” scolds Arthur. “We
Français
must maintain our reputation for chic.”

“I’m hunky-dory,” says Jenny, dropping her revolver into her trouser pocket.

“Find her something, would you, my sweet?” Arthur asks Blanche.

Who goes into the bedroom. First she puts the rest of the cash she earned this evening into a shabby high-heeled boot under the bed. (A little nest egg she’s never felt the need to mention to Arthur.) The deed to the building she keeps tucked behind a lithograph of his favorite painting: a strange picnic in which a naked woman sits on the grass between two black-jacketed dandies.

Then Blanche opens a tin-covered trunk, still bearing its pasted labels from when they arrived on the
Utopia
. (Arthur likes to keep his things perfectly folded but refuses to succumb to anything as respectable as a chest of drawers.) She picks out one of his shirts—not the newest, because they may never run into this Jenny character again, but still an elegant one, greenish, with a flowering-vine motif.

By the time she gets back to the salon, Arthur’s dusted off the steak and thrown it into a chafing dish over the flame of the spirit lamp. He’s scrambling some eggs too. Jenny goes into the bedroom to change. Arthur sends Ernest out for bread, and Blanche back into the bedroom to see if their visitor needs anything else.

Blanche finds Jenny pulling the shirt on over her head; the way men do it, it strikes her.

“A little privacy,” snaps Jenny.

Blanche recoils, turning her back. What the hell does Jenny think she’s hiding? As if it’s not perfectly clear she’s got a pair of little breasts under there …

“Thanks for the shirt,” says Jenny, her voice so civil now it’s as if Blanche imagined her angry tone. “First time in a fancy-patterned one.”

Blanche doesn’t answer, just heads for the salon.

“Who’s the baby?”

That freezes her.

Jenny’s plucked the silver frame out of a litter of kohl, rouge, and jewelry on the small table.

“Our son.” It sounds grand, solemn. Blanche has never had to explain the photograph before. “P’tit,” she adds, diffident. She calls him that, but really it’s P’tit Arthur—Little Arthur.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh no, he’s not—he’s being nursed out, on a farm, for his health,” Blanche clarifies. “I was taken sick after he was born …”

Memories like flotsam looming through the fog of that dimly remembered milk fever. How the creature leaked from every aperture—emerald pus in the corners of his eyes, even—and wouldn’t touch her right nipple but worried her left till it bled, and keened from five o’clock every afternoon on until the whole building seemed to shake … Blanche was delirious and vomiting by the time Arthur carried the infant away to ask Madame Johanna’s advice. His decisiveness filled Blanche with gratitude, especially when Madame found some compatriots of her own, the Hoffmans, to take P’tit in at once. Even though Blanche hurt twice as much when P’tit was gone—her left breast swelling up like something out of a dime museum, so ugly that she refused to let Arthur set eyes on her without a wrap for a week—it was such a relief, being quiet, alone with the pain.

Jenny’s scrutinizing the carte de visite. “But you said for
his
health. What’s wrong with him?”

Blanche blinks at the blunt question. “Nothing.” Nothing in particular, that is. True to his name, P’tit’s still tiny, except for the huge eyes. There’s a lassitude to him, a dullness that disappoints her. But Blanche’s siblings were all older than her, so what does she know about how babies should be? At least his belly’s round; when she reports this to Arthur, he always says it’s proof that P’tit must be eating well at the Hoffmans’. “It’s the done thing, you know, back home,” she says, her voice defensive.

“Is it?”

“You wouldn’t remember, because you left so young. One never sees a baby in Paris; they don’t thrive in cities. And rents are so high, mothers have to work … We were all farmed out to country folk,” she goes on, struggling to remember the name of the woman who looked after her. “I barely set eyes on my family till I was—” Three? Four? Blanche doesn’t recall how old she was, the day she was brought back. Just the feeling of being deposited among strangers, in that narrow house on the urban islet of Ile Saint-Louis that, she was informed, was home.

“So how old is your P’tit now?” asks Jenny, setting the picture back on the table.

“Almost—” Blanche reckons the months in her head, and is startled. Last week. How could the date have gone right by without her noticing? Was she drunk that day—drunker than usual? “Just about a year,” she says vaguely. Oh, well, never mind; a one-year-old doesn’t know what a birthday is.

“Do you visit much?” asks Jenny, putting on her waistcoat.

What a talent this one has for putting her nose in other people’s business. And her finger on sore points. “A nurse from the farm brings him,” says Blanche, as if answering the question.

Not to 815 Sacramento Street; P’tit hasn’t been back here since Arthur took him away to Madame. The nurse totes him in a basket to meet Blanche at the House of Mirrors. In the early months it was every week, without fail, even before Blanche had her health back. Of course she missed her little one; what kind of unnatural mother would she have been if she hadn’t missed him? Arthur came with her; two or three times, anyway. These days, the visits have slid to once a month, more or less, without Blanche recalling who set that schedule. They bore her and leave her vaguely uneasy. Blanche smiles and nods at her son’s slightly misshapen face for a quarter of an hour, privately wondering why he’s got a faint reek about him despite being trussed up in layers of starched linen. She once asked the taciturn, uniformed nurse, who looked offended and told her that was how they smelled, infants. Blanche doesn’t make the mistake of trying to pick P’tit up anymore; some babies just won’t stand for being fussed over, according to the nurse, who should know, Blanche supposes. She always brings him a molasses stick to suck, at least.

If she weren’t so busy all the time … It’ll be different when P’tit is old enough to respond more to her company, or at least recognize her. She’s just waiting till he’s got some spark in him, till he could be said to be thriving. Till he’s grown into the makings of a son worthy of the name of P’tit Arthur Deneve.

“What kind of farm,” Jenny wonders aloud as she buttons her jacket, “dairy, poultry, tillage?”

“Why do you ask?” says Blanche, nettled, instead of admitting she doesn’t know. Really, why should she allow herself to be interrogated about the finer points of the arrangement? It hardly matters whether the Hoffmans keep cows or chickens; P’tit’s too young to notice. He won’t remember, any more than Blanche recalls her first years. Dairy or goddamn tillage! She hasn’t been out to the farm yet, as it happens. Madame vouches for the place and seems happy to arrange P’tit’s visits to the House of Mirrors, so much more convenient than Blanche going out to the Hoffmans’. It all works perfectly well, so who does this stranger think she is, with her prodding and probing?

The front door; that must be Ernest with the bread.
“A table, messieurs-dames,”
calls Arthur, and they go in for breakfast.

At San Miguel Station, the fifteenth of September stops and starts, stops and starts. Only when Blanche notices she’s twisting her neck to get her face out of a puddle of light does she realize that it’s day. And then the terror seizes her again as she remembers: Arthur tried to kill her last night. It was only the wildest stroke of luck that shielded her, a one-in-a-million chance. There’s not a mark on Blanche except a tiny graze on her cheek from flying glass.
It should have been me, not poor Jenny
.

“Care for a wash, Miss Blanche?” offers Mary Jane McNamara.

She looks down at her ghastly browned clothes. “Have the police—”

“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of them yet,” says Mary Jane. “Dadda had to send another telegram in case the first one went astray, and Mrs. Holt wanted to know if he was doubting her competence.” Her tone bubbles. This murder is clearly the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened in the girl’s vicinity.

Blanche remembers being fifteen: the dull, shackled sensation that life is something that happens to other people. And then one day, with no warning, it begins.

He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease
,

A daring young man on the flying trapeze
.

Blanche went to see the circus, that’s all she did, a harmless way to spend a winter afternoon. And found herself gawking up at a beautiful olive-skinned man flying like a knife across the gilded ceiling. The crowd sang along to that year’s hit waltz:

He’d smile from the bar on the people below
,

And one night he smiled on my love
.

She winked back at him and she shouted, “Bravo!”

As he hung by his nose up above
.

Blanche hung around the stage door for hours, not caring that she was cold or that she was missing her supper, at least, or earning herself a beating. At last he came out, in street clothes and half drunk already, the lovely man; his greasepaint was meticulously wiped off but his face still held the eye. One arm slung around a lanky boy with the beginnings of a mustache. (That was Ernest; Blanche didn’t pay him much attention at first. Didn’t know how many years ago Arthur had taken this orphan on as his protégé, his circus brother.) She hung around, chattering and flirting as hard as she could, till night fell.

She came back the next day. He was a thrilling exotic to her: Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve. Twenty-two, and a man of the world; he’d read things, been places, tried everything. He boasted of being a bohemian, and Blanche didn’t even know the word, but she swore she was one too. She was fifteen, and barely had a bosom yet, but it was just as well, because circus girls needed to be as light as air, and soon Arthur was persuading his Monsieur Loyal to try her out on the Shetland pony …

But what does all that matter now? What does it prove? That Arthur was a fine piece of manhood until this summer? Until circumstances conspired to—no, let’s be honest. Until Blanche broke him. Broke his heart, his spirit. Broke the charming man Arthur seemed to be, cracked that shell and let the devil seep out. Maybe it just proves she was an idiot to fall in love with him nine years ago.

Her brain’s still moving at half-pace. It must be tiredness. And shock.
If Arthur wanted me dead last night, he wants me dead today
. She’d better run for her life. But not in these clothes, Blanche decides, staring down at herself.

Like some automaton, she follows Mary Jane out of the Eight Mile House. On the threshold between the saloon and the rickety porch, her feet lock, refusing to carry her into the hard brightness. She straightens her aching shoulders and makes herself step forward, steeling herself against imagined gunfire. (As if muscles could repel buckshot!) The air’s heating up already, dusty; better than the stink of blood and whiskey, at least. Blanche puts up one hand to shield her face. Where’s her straw hat? Even under these circumstances, she finds—even today—she’s not willing to get a freckle. Her translucent pallor is one of the things Blanche is known for, the promise in her name. Otherwise she’d just be plain Adèle Beunon again.