Sister Noon (9 page)

Jenny refused to put her arms around Lizzie, which would have helped balance her. “Where are we going?” she asked again.

“Do you want to go back?”

“No.”

Lizzie turned left at the thorny rose garden of Trinity Church. The wind picked up considerably. A man walked ahead of them, going their same direction on Bush Street. She put Jenny down, glad for a reason to fall farther behind him.

“Will we ever go back?” asked Jenny.

“Yes, of course. Soon. We’re just taking the air.”

The man had heard them. He turned, but only briefly. Lizzie wondered who he imagined they were, what he imagined they were doing. A woman evinced her class in a variety of ways; Lizzie was good at reading the clues herself and assumed that she was also good at sending them. An unescorted woman could always be misunderstood, but surely the presence of a child conferred respectability. In any case, the man appeared uninterested.

It was very cold. Lizzie began to wish she’d sent Jenny straight back to bed. Why in the world hadn’t she? She wished for a different place to go. She wished for lights and more people, or absolute dark and fewer.

“When I was just a little girl like you, you’d hear coyotes out here at night,” Lizzie said. “The city hadn’t come
this far yet. I saw a horse race near this very spot with those big golden horses the Spanish had. It was Diego Estenegas’s sixteenth birthday. We had
cascarones
. Do you know what
cascarones
are?”

“No.”

“Eggshells filled with perfume and tinsel and flour. You break them over people’s heads. Even my father came home streaked with flour.”

“Why?”

“My father did business with the Estenegas family. He brokered their beef to local hotels. They were kind enough to include me in the invitation. It was a party.”

Jenny sat down in the dirt. “Something’s in my shoe,” she said. She removed it.

Lizzie was forced to squat beside her. She took Jenny’s shoe, shook out a thin stream of sand, like the drift in an hourglass. Lizzie had been to few enough parties as a child. Perhaps that was why this one remained so vivid. How could it be so long ago? She could see her mother, her hair falling from its pins, brandishing an eggshell, but that couldn’t have happened, it must have been someone else’s mother.

The Spanish women had been beautiful, with their bright dresses and diamond haircombs. Though some had married American husbands, few of the men had taken American wives. Were there really so many fewer Spanish families now, which was the way it seemed, or had the city simply filled in around them with Italians and Irish and Chinese? Diego Estenegas was like a prince and smiled once at Lizzie so she always remembered it.

Her father would have been furious with her if he’d
known she was waiting for a Spanish prince. Her mother would have sent her to bed until she got over the idea. Because she’d managed to keep it a secret, she never had gotten over it.

“You might be Spanish, Jenny,” Lizzie said, “what with your dark eyes and hair.
¿Hablas español?
”

Jenny didn’t answer. Lizzie replaced her shoe and picked her up. The man was gone. The ground was level again.

The sidewalk began on Octavia Street and ran beneath the blue-gum eucalyptus trees. Mary Ellen Pleasant had planted these herself, only a few years before, but they had grown quickly and were already tall by San Francisco standards. Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to use the bark and the seeds in her brews. Lizzie looked up the trunk to where the leaves hung, clustered and limp as Japanese wind chimes. The trees gave off the smell of unripened lemons.

Lizzie set Jenny down. The House of Mystery was dark, except for one window on the second floor. Its curtains were drawn, and glowed faintly with a backlight of gold. A dog barked in the distance; Lizzie couldn’t tell whether it was inside the house or out. “Have you ever been here?” Lizzie asked.

“No.”

“I’ve been to tea here. You can’t imagine how beautiful it is. You can’t tell from the outside.”

“Like a palace?” Jenny asked.

Lizzie had never been to a palace. “Inside, yes. Exactly like.”

Suddenly, all around the quiet mansion with its homey golden window was the illusion of tumult. Clouds flew
across the sky like enormous birds, making the moonlight blink on and off so the whole landscape flickered. The shadows of the trees scudded over the ground; the wind rattled the leaves.

In all that movement there was no person. Lizzie wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. Reporters sometimes flocked outside the House of Mystery, pigeons pecking for crumbs. Occasionally someone sneaked into the yard to dig for the diamond necklaces Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to have buried there.

Quite inexplicably, everything combined to unnerve Lizzie—the lack of people, the flying clouds, the witches’-brew smell, the single lit window, the Wilkie Collins book at home that she was halfway through. The string of women who’d been murdered on the streets of Whitechapel a year or so ago.

There
was a thought Lizzie wished she hadn’t had! She tried desperately to unthink it. Diego Estenegas smiling at her.

No good! The women were fed with poisoned grapes.

Golden horses! Diamond haircombs! Diamond necklaces! Their hearts cut out as if they were voodoo chickens! Lizzie’s breath was shallow and fast.

Jenny yawned and shivered. Lizzie picked her up and started back to the Ark, moving now as quickly as she could. On Bush Street they passed a pair of young men walking arm in arm. Lizzie heard their footsteps first and was relieved to see that there were two of them, and both apparently sober.

The men had almost passed before one of them spoke. “Are you an idiot?” he asked, in a tone no one had used
with her since her father died. She turned to make sure he was addressing her and not his companion, and this allowed him to come too close. “Out here after dark with a child?” He was shaking his head. “What kind of a mother are you?”

The other man spoke next. “What kind of woman walks the streets at night? Is that what you want men to think?”

They were at least twenty years younger than she, and not so nicely dressed. She would not be chastised by boys. “How does it concern you?”

“We’re compelled to see you safely home. It wasn’t our plan for the evening.”

“Nor is it my plan now.”

“We don’t want you,” said Jenny.

“Go away,” said Lizzie. She used her public-speaking voice and she expected to be obeyed. “You must see I wouldn’t be here without a compelling reason. You must see that I wouldn’t have brought this child out into the cold and dark, in the dead of winter, on a whim.” There was an uneven place in the road. Lizzie stumbled.

One man offered his arm. One man offered to take Jenny.

Lizzie refused both offers. She carried Jenny without stopping, all the way to the edge of the Brown Ark’s sandy yard, though her arms and back ached as a result. The men strolled beside her, smoking cigars and continuing a private conversation about a friend named Darby who’d recently fallen down a flight of stairs and yet was planning a balloon ascension. Lizzie tried twice more to send them off, but they were enjoying her embarrassment too much.
It was highly likely that one, at least, had blue eyes, but Lizzie refused to permit either of them the dignity of being portentous. There’d be plenty more blue-eyed men to choose from, men she liked better. When she turned in at the Ark, they finally left her, tipping their hats and congratulating themselves, no doubt, on their fine manners.

Lizzie was so angry her jaw hurt. She paused outside to remove Jenny’s shoes and brush the sand from her stockings. “Let’s not tell,” she suggested. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” said Jenny. Lizzie suspected she excelled at it.

“Of course, if they ask us right out, did you walk to Mrs. Pleasant’s last night, we won’t lie,” Lizzie added. “You must never tell a lie, Jenny.”

She led Jenny up the stairs to her cot, helped her undress and get into her nightgown. There was no movement or sound; the abandoned girls slept like princesses, each with a scuffed pair of shoes waiting by the bed.

Lizzie returned to the cupola, wishing for her bed at home. She could not get comfortable; she was not tired enough. Cold, anger, and the itchy settee kept her awake. Her first escapade, and nothing had come of it but her own ridiculous panic and the insults of chivalrous men. She had been laughed at in the public streets.

But by the morning she saw things quite differently. She had gotten away with it completely. Surely her impulsiveness could only improve. It just wanted practice.

B
y morning Lizzie was finally tired. She went home for a restorative nap. On the breakfast table, she found an invitation from the Putnams. “I’ll watch over Lizzie until the day she weds,” Mrs. Putnam had once promised Lizzie’s mother, and she’d been as good as her word. Lizzie’s mother was on her deathbed at the time, so the promise was a binding one. So many people watching over Lizzie! Of course, no one had imagined Lizzie’s wedding day to be quite so far off as it was proving.

She slit the Putnams’ invitation open with her father’s marble-handled letter knife and read that she was to be included in an evening of inquiry, in Suite 540 at the Palace. Dr. Ellinwood, a medium visiting from Philadelphia, would host an informal discussion of spiritism and its
compatibility with the tenets of Christianity. If the aspects were favorable, if the guests then desired it, Dr. Ellinwood was prepared to contact the dead. “Such an obliging man,” Mrs. Putnam wrote, “for you can’t imagine how exhausting Contact is.”

And yet Lizzie could imagine this perfectly well. Lizzie didn’t really want to talk to the dead. It was a difficult thing to say to the Putnams. It was a difficult thing to acknowledge even to herself. Her parents had loved her. They were entitled to be deeply missed. Lizzie didn’t want to be present when they came back and discovered they were not.

Besides, she had gone to séances before, heard many a table rapped, been a link in many a magnetic chain. In her experience, the dead had surprisingly little of interest to say. It seemed to be all me, me, me, after you died.

And on the other hand, the Palace! Eight hundred rooms, seven floors, and an enormous amber skylight topping the whole. The opulent hotel had been built with the profits of the Comstock Lode supplemented by the embezzlement of the Bank of California. Leland Stanford was the first name on its guestbook, Charles Crocker the first to enter its dining room.

Only recently the gaslamps in the restaurant had been replaced with three hundred twenty electric lights. In the suites themselves, major improvements were rumored to have been made in the bathrooms. If a ladylike opportunity presented itself, Lizzie would like to see one of those bathrooms.

Plus, the Putnams were rich and charitable and would invite more of the same. Contact with the dead would put all present in mind of their immortal souls. It was the best possible setting in which to ask for money. The Brown Ark
needed more beds, the children coats and shoes. In point of fact, Lizzie had a clear duty to attend.

The evening of inquiry took place on the very next Saturday. Outside, a chilly rain fell, and the Putnams had kindly offered their carriage. Lizzie paused to remove her gloves and pet Roscoe, the closest of the horses. She had driven Roscoe herself as a girl. Blind in one eye, so you had to use a single rein or he wandered to the wrong side of the road, but utterly unprovocable, with a gait like cream. The rain left shiny streaks on his coat. His neck was warm and wet on Lizzie’s hand, and he steamed like a teakettle in the cold.

She climbed into the carriage and the comfortable heat of Mrs. Putnam. Mrs. Putnam was an ample woman, dressed against the cold in a fashionable sealskin sacque and a new black straw hat. “Erma’s had her fourth. A little boy,” Mrs. Putnam told Lizzie straight off, hugging her so tightly she left the scent of almond soap on her sleeves. Erma was the Putnams’ only child, and everyone imagined Lizzie was fond of her. Certainly they’d played together often as children. But since Erma had married and moved to Sacramento more than fifteen years before, Lizzie had hardly seen her.

“Six and a half pounds. Little Charlie John. The mother blooming. Father bursting with pride.”

“Never you mind, now, Lizzie,” Mr. Putnam said, when Lizzie didn’t mind in the least. Any marriage that necessitated a move to Sacramento was nothing to envy.

Mrs. Mullin was seated opposite Lizzie. She was a gaunt woman with dark, deep-set eyes; it was hard to look at her face without imagining her skull. Her hat was more
opulent but less smart than Mrs. Putnam’s. Emerald wings spread over the crown as if her hair were a nest on which a headless bird brooded. “We’ll see you with your own babies yet,” she told Lizzie.

“I have sixty-two babies at present.” Lizzie kept her tone light.

“That’s the way to look at it,” Mr. Putnam said. He turned to his wife. “Our Lizzie has sixty-two babies!”

Lizzie didn’t often mind not being married. She’d had offers. Few women in San Francisco went entirely uncourted, and none of those had yellow hair and financial prospects. Dr. Beecher, a friend of her father’s, had taken a fancy to her when she was just a girl. Strange how people would think better of her now if she’d only accepted him then, and him a man with a coarse manner, who smelled of brine, but dirty, and who stared at her as though she were something to be killed and eaten. Cats fled when Dr. Beecher entered a room.